Over the past couple of years, the business world has experienced an unprecedented amount of turbulence and massive shifts in working culture which have made Enterprises seriously rethink their business strategies.
Turning headwinds into tailwinds
For some, the headwinds brought about by a global pandemic have slowed down, or in some cases even halted growth. However, some businesses have looked at the situation as an opportunity for reinvention – and it’s these businesses that have successfully adapted that are turning headwinds into tailwinds.
Building operational resilience is now a major part of a company’s strategy and changing habits and strategies to accelerate digital transformation directives is now just a part of business as usual (BAU).
Embracing the evolution
The workplace is no longer a physical space occupied by employees during set hours. Today's ‘always connected’, instant-access culture has blurred the lines between the physical office and the place where work actually happens.
There is a steady erosion of the distinction between professional and personal life, and as the workplace becomes digital-first, employees are communicating and collaborating in revolutionary and innovative ways.
Enabling knowledge-sharing across an organization, requires the capacity to create productive business relationships beyond natural work groups. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the traditional 'create and push' information approach no longer meets the evolving needs of businesses.
According to IDC, leading global provider of market intelligence, a digital-first destiny for the world economy is a given. Digital transformation is well underway, and like a tsunami, it’s creating choppy winds for business and technology leaders to navigate.
The widespread proliferation of information technology over the last 3 decades has had a permanent effect on the ways in which employees connect, collaborate and communicate. In a recent report by Deloitte, they identify three fundamental trends that have influenced this:
- An aging workforce. As baby boomers are rapidly retiring, their knowledge is retiring with them.
- Information overload. With the exponential growth of information, employees are finding it increasingly hard to find what they need, even with technology advances.
- On the fast track. The rapid pace of today’s work environment means employees need to collaborate more effectively to achieve business objectives.
Accelerated partnerships: The way of the future
The need for seamless collaboration within an organization is crucial. But another way for businesses to turn headwinds into tailwinds is to shift the way they view collaboration with other businesses, even if at first, they look like a competitor!
Here are some examples of how partnerships can provide more value for business processes, and richer collaboration experiences.
IR and Jabra partnership. IR Collaborate has integrated with Jabra, a leading global enterprise audio technology provider for managed service providers and contact centers. The partnership adds real-time endpoint data to enhance the monitoring alerting, and troubleshooting of meetings and calls using Jabra devices, wherever users are working.
IR and BT partnership. IR was selected to monitor, manage, and ensure the highest quality experience for users of BT’s managed unified communications and collaboration services, BT Meetings. It is the only contract to date signed by BT for an application & experience monitoring solution for its digital services platform.
“Selecting the right partners is critical for success. We chose IR because we share the same goal of delivering outstanding customer experiences. Our new digital services platform provides customers with flexibility and choice while ensuring the highest quality services and user experience. IR Collaborate meets our needs today and has the capability to adapt as our customers’ needs change in the future.”
Andrew Small, Managing Director, Global Portfolio, BT.
The new digital workplace: The future is looming
We’re already seeing significant structural changes to the workplace with the acceleration of the digital transformation curve. Predictions for the near future suggest:
- A reshaping of industry ecosystems through greater connectivity and data sharing.
- A rise in digital start-ups and widening gaps between digital thrivers and survivors.
- Intelligence and automation will be the greatest influence on shifts in the supply side.
- New approaches in how and where goods and services are produced and consumed.
How IR Collaborate can facilitate growth in the new digital workplace
The graphic below is an excellent illustration of the future outlook for enterprise organizations worldwide.
Changing headwinds into tailwinds will be the way businesses move forward to have any hope of competing and staying afloat in the modern workplace. The IR Collaborate suite of performance management solutions can speak to each of the elements below, to help businesses take a holistic approach to their digital transformation journey.
- Interpreting your data. It’s not enough to just collect data – you need to understand and interpret what it’s telling you. Our monitoring solutions can dive deep into your entire UC ecosystem and extract and analyze data that directly relates to specific problems within your systems.
- Creating stability. Call and video quality is non-negotiable. The success of your communications infrastructure depends on it. You need to know exactly why calls are dropping out, video quality is poor, audio isn’t working. Collaborate can show you every endpoint, what’s going wrong, where and why.
- Being interactive instead of process driven. The IT helpdesk is becoming a thing of the past. Waiting for something to go wrong and addressing it reactively is no longer a viable solution for businesses. Collaborate makes it easy to interact with your systems, learn, predict, and proactively prevent problems.
- An increase in ROI. Better visibility into end-user UC systems means faster MTTR and less time and wages lost due to productivity impacts. Businesses can get ahead of potential problems. For example IR Collaborate can identify that a certain cluster of endpoints are seeing a consistent uptick in their CPU usage, alerting business IT teams of the potential productivity-impacting issue. Our solution has proven to show actual ROI in savings that will justify the value.
A solid UC infrastructure has never been more important, as it enables business leaders to navigate the turbulence of the modern digital workplace. But your UC infrastructure is only as solid as the tools you have in place to support it.
