Rebecca Gibson |
This article first appeared in the Spring 2017 issue of The Record.
Just one minute’s loss of productivity could cost multinational networking and communications technology and service provider Ericsson up to €3 billion (US$3.26 billion). With so much at stake, Ericsson has reimagined and digitised workflows so its employees can make every second count.
“There’s a multitude of things we can do to give time back to employees – little things like booting up their PCs quicker and helping them find the right conference room,” says Anders Jönsson, Ericsson’s head of Digital Workspace and Customer Engagement. “We have people in offices, factories and out in the field and all these employees need different types of solutions that fit with their particular role.”
Creating solutions that meet the needs of specific users is easier and less expensive now that technology is more mature, says Chris Moyer, vice president of Mobility and Workplace, and CTO at HPE Enterprise Services (HPE ES). “We’re looking at how we can empower people, give them more space to innovate, and provide the tools so they can get the information they want to make it easier to connect and collaborate.”
From Windows 10 mobile applications that put relevant data into employees’ hands wherever they are, to optimised meeting room solutions, HPE ES has developed a raft of solutions for the modern enterprise.
“We’ve created interactive workshops that put the user at the centre and we map the journey with clients to ensure it fits their business challenges,” comments Moyer. “Some companies, like Ericsson, want a click-and-connect video conferencing experience, while others want a more secure IT platform, or have apps that they want to get into the right peoples’ hands. We have solutions for all of this and our teams have put a lot of time and effort into making the engineering compartmentalised and reusable so that it’s quicker to get, and keep, our clients modernised.”
Ultimately, says Moyer, employees will be able to seamlessly flip between personal and professional life as workspaces become more interactive and intelligent.
“Everyone says our people are our most important asset, so let’s enable them with the solutions that allow them to do their job faster, give back those minutes, and offer them better access to information both inside and outside of the enterprise so they can do things they couldn’t do before,” Moyer advises. “We have to do some change management, but the people we’re hiring have high expectations and our job as IT is to live up to that.”