Office to Edge to Hybrid
As many organisations wrangle with the ‘great resignation’ that is trending on social media, how do they ensure employee retention, attraction and getting the right balance of inclusion V productivity V interaction. There are many things that contribute to this not least an organisations culture, leadership and as importantly, the user experience when it comes down to having the right tools to fulfil their roles.
Whilst we don’t want to focus on the pandemic per se, it did contribute to a significantly changed business model of remote working over night. Organisations focussed on ensuring that their employees were able to connect securely to corporate systems against the back drop of increased demand for cloud and unified communications services for engagement internally and externally. As we move way from the pandemic and organisations wrangle with the right employee working model, we are talking about Office to Edge to Hybrid. This is not about the technology, but about the best way to attract, retain and deliver the best employee experience.
It appears the preferred business model is a hybrid approach whereby employees spend 2-3 days in an office (organisational or flexible meeting space) to ensure employees feel part of a team and get the correct balance for health and well being but also wanting to retain the flexibility of home working and the benefits this brings.
However, this does bring with it the need to assess the user experience to ensure that regardless of location employees are empowered to deliver excellence to their customers.
Here at Camwood, we have talked previously about applications being an after thought rather than a business owned asset which is critical. Applications can be delivered to users in many different ways.
Modern and legacy applications have a multitude of delivery models, dependant on your application management platform. From traditional on-premises solutions such as Microsoft Configuration Manager to cloud based Microsoft Endpoint Manager/Intune. The critical item to be aware of regardless of the delivery model is to provide standardisation across all application engineering and the way they are delivered to end users. By having a disjointed approach to application management and delivery, you have the potential to reduce user productivity and increase service team overheads associated to application management issues.
MSIX is the new universal package format designed for Windows applications that supports desktop, mobile, and other Windows devices. It has been identified since the release of the technology, that there have been teething issues when applying application engineering to MSIX formats. However, with the introduction of Windows 11, Microsoft have streamlined and simplified the approach to either packaging applications or converting applications to MSIX for Windows 11.
Retaining and attracting staff is a real strategic initiative for organisations in the current climate. Ensuring that they receive the best and simplest user experience at the lowest cost to service their customers will be a key differentiator and competitive advantage.Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. The take away from this is to treat applications as a valued business asset and be prepared.
