Time To Plan For 2023 Digital Office Investments

The top of 2022 is quick approaching, and digital office professionals in all places are beginning to plan their investments and technique for 2023. Right here at Forrester, we’ve been fielding dozens of consumer questions from digital office leaders in search of steerage on the right way to put together for the approaching 12 months. With so many macro traits impacting tech decision-making — recessions, hybrid work, provide chain disruption, and extra — it’s clear that we’re in for one more 12 months of serious change within the digital office. Earlier this 12 months, Forrester launched our strategic recommendation for the digital office, which we outline as:

The ecosystem of applied sciences that organizations deploy to allow a productive and safe digital worker expertise. The digital office contains six core parts: core productiveness platforms, employee-facing HR instruments, an orchestration layer, expertise touchpoints, analytics, and software integration.

The place Will Innovation Happen In 2023?

In 2023, we’ll see enhancements to all six parts of the digital office. As we name out in our report, digital worker expertise (DEX) will stay a focus for digital office leaders as they try to make use of expertise to draw expertise, enhance productiveness, and promote worker engagement. Anticipate to see the next digital office traits:

• Organizations will pursue tactical use instances to drive DEX ROI. Digital worker expertise has been a sizzling space for shoppers ever because the pandemic pressured workers residence, and it’s nonetheless essential. Sixty p.c of expertise and enterprise leaders point out that bettering EX is a prime IT precedence over the following 12 months. Fears of an upcoming recession, nonetheless, will probably impression DEX funding in 2023, leading to longer and smaller offers. Why? Many leaders wrestle to outline the ROI of DEX investments at this time, which is able to make this class more durable to justify to CFOs. The end result? Enterprises should give attention to DEX use instances that scale back price and enhance expertise.
  Forrester’s recommendation: Double down on expertise funding. Forrester’s Planning Information 2023: Expertise Structure & Supply calls out continued funding in core enterprise functions and options that defend enterprise belongings and other people. Whereas others could pull again on DEX funding, that is the time to leapfrog your competitors. Tactical DEX enchancment use instances with tangible ROI — equivalent to proactive expertise administration — ought to be key focus areas. 
• Proactive expertise administration will grow to be mainstream. Proactive approaches to expertise administration purpose to forestall expertise points from impacting workers. Importantly for leaders in 2023, they each enhance DEX and scale back prices. Forrester witnessed actual deployments of proactive IT support in 2022. For instance, CGI is utilizing AIOps and conversational AI to deflect 8,000 occasions a month. Proactivity will grow to be extra mainstream in 2023 and can develop into new use instances equivalent to asset administration, system refresh, and break/repair.
  Forrester’s recommendation: Deal with constructing an correct knowledge mannequin to faciliate proactivity. Proactivity is barely doable with the appropriate knowledge to tell actions. Knowledge from end-user expertise administration (EUEM) platforms, endpoint administration instruments, and enterprise service administration distributors can successfully string collectively a number of varieties of knowledge to attain proactivity. These are normally ripe for proactive expertise remediation. What varieties of knowledge do it’s essential to accumulate in 2023 to facilitate proactive administration?
   
• Vendor consolidation will happen throughout a number of digital office classes. 2022 noticed an acceleration of a development towards simplifying digital office portfolios. Microsoft Groups, for instance, added software and file help immediately into the platform, whereas distributors equivalent to Appspace-Beezy and Poppulo-SmartSpace-FWI mixed forces to unify bodily and digital workspaces and endpoint administration distributors more and more constructed DEX capabilities immediately into the platform. In 2023, count on to see higher integration between EUEM and AIOps instruments, consolidation of visible collaboration instruments into broader suites, and integration of extra good workplace tooling into digital office choices.
  Forrester’s recommendation: Assess your present software stack now. Search for overlapping function units from a number of suppliers. Are there alternatives for simplification? Might DEX enhance if workers accessed these capabilities from a single platform? Integrations that scale back context switching will particularly impression worker productiveness in optimistic methods.
   
• Personalization will rise as a digital office requirement. Personalization has been a key development within the worker communications area since pre-pandemic occasions however is now discovering its position within the digital office stack. Orchestration and viewers segmentation capabilities allow the supply of focused content material, data, apps, and notifications into most well-liked interfaces. These individualized experiences may be based mostly on the worker’s position, job degree, and even how they match into the anywhere-work spectrum of residence workplace, company workplace, or frequent traveler.
  Forrester’s recommendation: Equip completely different worker personas with their very own individualized digital workspaces — which Forrester defines as “the customized and customizable set of apps, content material, and gadgets that make up a person’s productiveness expertise based on their office persona.”
   
• Digital office leaders will double down on new approaches to success metrics. Look ahead to extra cohesion across the numerous analytics and dashboards provided by completely different parts of the digital office. Traditional engagement measurements (equivalent to content material views, e mail open charges, variety of contributors in a chat channel) or service-level settlement (SLA) measurements for software uptime, for instance, will shift into extra employee-centric “experience-level agreements” (XLAs). A few of these XLAs shall be “SLA 2.0” — like PC boot time — however others will have in mind broader worker journeys — like onboarding.
  Forrester’s recommendation: Outline success based mostly on worker outcomes, not on simply IT efficiencies or the info that’s best to report on. Measure worker satisfaction on an ongoing foundation and benchmark real-time human experiences — not the efficiency of servers or apps.

Want Assist With Your Technique?

For those who’d prefer to study extra about the right way to construct a digital office technique, shoppers can entry our current report and recorded webinar, or attain out to Andrew and Cheryl at [email protected].