Gartner: 8 Critical Components of a Digital Workplace
August 23, 2017
Share this

Digital workplace programs often lose their way, or fail, due to a fragmented approach that prioritizes a few technology "fixes" over business strategy, according to Gartner, Inc. To combat this, digital workplace leaders need to employ a framework to ensure their digital workplace initiatives address all of the eight critical components required for a successful implementation.

"The digital workplace promises a more flexible, engaging and intelligent work environment that is able to exploit changing business conditions," said Carol Rozwell, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. "To be successful, a digital workplace can't be built in a vacuum. It must be part of a wider business strategy that seeks to boost employee agility and engagement by developing a more consumerized work environment."

Gartner has identified the eight critical components — "building blocks" — that application leaders need when planning, directing and evolving digital workplace programs.

1. Vision: Describe What Digital Workplace Success Will Look Like

The vision describes the future state of the digital workplace and how it will benefit all stakeholders. It should be consistent with the organization's values and serve as a source of inspiration to the stakeholders who will craft the strategy and tactics to realize the vision.

2. Strategy: Create a Roadmap to Reach the Destination

The strategy describes the approach an organization will use to achieve its vision and create a digitally empowered workforce. It clearly defines the strategic roadmap to achieve the organization's business goals.

3. Metrics: Measure Performance and Value

How application leaders of digital workplace programs measure the value of their initiatives should be an extension of the organization's current approach. Each initiative should be designed to have a positive impact on a business value metric, such as workforce effectiveness, employee agility, employee satisfaction and employee retention. Effective metrics also provide a feedback mechanism for continuous development of strategy and tactics, serve as great tools for change management, and help structure employee incentives.

4. Employee Experience: Design for Improved Employee Interaction

Creating an excellent employee experience is a pivotal aspect of a digital workplace. An engaged, creative and energetic workforce outperforms the competition in terms of service delivery, execution and product design.

"The aim should be to increase employees' participation in any workplace redesign, in order to create an environment that will make them more effective and connect them better to the outcomes of the business," said Rozwell.

5. Organizational Change: Start Small but Think Big

As digital workplace initiatives mature, they require considerable change to an organization's internal processes, departmental structures, incentives, skills, culture and behavior. Ultimately, digital workplace initiatives will affect every system, process and role within the organization.

6. Processes: Re-engineer How High-Impact Work Is Done

Digital workplace programs are particularly powerful when they set their sights on increasing the effectiveness of people who do high-impact work. Such work benefits from more agile, responsive and collaborative processes that rely more on the ability to respond rapidly to changing circumstances. Re-engineering business processes requires a close look at how employees currently work, in order to design new work journeys. The new and improved ways of working will involve the addition of new tools to enable collaborative work, use of other new technologies and adaptation of outmoded processes.

7. Information: Rework Access and Use of Content and Analytics

Workers expect enterprise tools for searching, sharing and consuming information to be as "smart" and compelling as those they use in their personal lives. They want information and analytics to be contextualized, based on their work, and delivered when they need it. By 2020, algorithms will improve the behavior of over 1 billion workers.

8. Technology: Take a Platform Approach to Workplace Investments

Application leaders responsible for digital workplace programs must work out how to use technology to reach customers, internet-connected "things" and ecosystems. They must also determine how new technologies such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things can enable more effective ways of working, and how to exploit the next wave of technology innovation without having to constantly rearchitect.

Share this

The Latest

June 01, 2023

The journey of maturing observability practices for users entails navigating peaks and valleys. Users have clearly witnessed the maturation of their monitoring capabilities, embraced DevOps practices, and adopted cloud and cloud-native technologies. Notwithstanding that, we witness the gradual increase of the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) for production issues year over year ...

May 31, 2023

Optimizing existing use of cloud is the top initiative — for the seventh year in a row, reported by 62% of respondents in the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report ...

May 30, 2023

Gartner highlighted four trends impacting cloud, data center and edge infrastructure in 2023, as infrastructure and operations teams pivot to support new technologies and ways of working during a year of economic uncertainty ...

May 25, 2023

Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software ...

May 24, 2023

As SLOs grow in popularity their usage is becoming more mature. For example, 82% of respondents intend to increase their use of SLOs, and 96% have mapped SLOs directly to their business operations or already have a plan to, according to The State of Service Level Objectives 2023 from Nobl9 ...

May 23, 2023

Observability has matured beyond its early adopter position and is now foundational for modern enterprises to achieve full visibility into today's complex technology environments, according to The State of Observability 2023, a report released by Splunk in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group ...

May 22, 2023

Before network engineers even begin the automation process, they tend to start with preconceived notions that oftentimes, if acted upon, can hinder the process. To prevent that from happening, it's important to identify and dispel a few common misconceptions currently out there and how networking teams can overcome them. So, let's address the three most common network automation myths ...

May 18, 2023

Many IT organizations apply AI/ML and AIOps technology across domains, correlating insights from the various layers of IT infrastructure and operations. However, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has observed significant interest in applying these AI technologies narrowly to network management, according to a new research report, titled AI-Driven Networks: Leveling Up Network Management with AI/ML and AIOps ...

May 17, 2023

When it comes to system outages, AIOps solutions with the right foundation can help reduce the blame game so the right teams can spend valuable time restoring the impacted services rather than improving their MTTI score (mean time to innocence). In fact, much of today's innovation around ChatGPT-style algorithms can be used to significantly improve the triage process and user experience ...

May 16, 2023

Gartner identified the top 10 data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2023 that can guide D&A leaders to create new sources of value by anticipating change and transforming extreme uncertainty into new business opportunities ...