Preparing for an Era of Virtualization On-Demand

(Virtual Camaraderie, Understanding, Comfort, Trust and more)

A novel virus that is keeping us contained in our homes is rewiring our relationship with the world outside, especially physical spaces, and particularly our workplaces. Never before have people stayed away from their steel-and-glass towers of work and still been so productive, for weeks on end, from their home offices. While many companies admittedly struggled to settle their workforce into distributed home offices, now that they’re figuring out how to make remote working work, it is going to get harder—even costly —to not consider the model as a norm for the future. No longer will it suffice to digitize just our customer value chains. Our global talent value chain - people interactions, processes and systems - will need to become all-digital too. And with it will virtualize the human side of work too.

Virtual Camaraderie: Digitizing Work and Workplace

Cloud-powered technology tactics for team and ecosystem collaboration will become pervasive. In addition to anytime-anywhere collaboration and compute-on-the-go, data-led smart automation will enable massive personal productivity gains. We will reorient our operating models and build greater flexibility into our workplaces, talent models and policies. This is create the landscapes in which technology can boost productivity for our recovery-focused businesses. Adoption of virtual desktops supported by globally distributed, secure cloud infrastructure will enable much-needed workspace elasticity. When complemented by cloud environments to build and test run applications, this will empower our remote and distributed workforces to build upon each other’s work, innovate faster and at scale. Shared success will be celebrated more than ever. This will prove to be a significant worker amplifier, because productivity and performance will increasingly be measured in terms of joint value created from outcomes, rather than a count of lag indicators like time and effort. 

Virtual Understanding: Persona-based Employee Service Experience

Our service experience as consumers has long been digitized and personalized. Apps and voice assistants that recognize us before they respond, no longer surprise us. For long our employees have waited for their service experience at work to catch up. As the personal and professional work environment blur in their home offices, this expectation will only escalate and consumer-grade experiences at work will become an inevitable eventuality. With remote workers spending their whole work week engaging with the applications they need to go about their tasks, a rich set of data will be generated and analyzed on the cloud. This can be easily leveraged to reimagine and design experiences based on each employee’s motivations, psychological traits and context. For example, automated smart nudges to encourage healthy routines like performing business critical operations ahead of time, or simply putting on VR gear, when stuck in the middle of a work problem, and instantly finding oneself with a mentor who’s ready to help. We already have the technology. We were already working in some of our offices like this. It’ll all be in a day’s work from home, very soon.

Virtual Comfort: Intelligent Self Service at Work

With remote workers accessing systems at unusual times, and also accessing systems they otherwise regularly didn’t, round-the-clock pressure on support teams will mount to breaking point. Their capability must be amplified by technology. Intelligent self-service, with cloud elasticity, for employees is the only way companies can drive service capacity higher and cost per service-request lower, even as the workforce scales. The results can drive a never-before always-on, always-reliable ecosystem of ready support for a workforce focused on delivering for the business. Our jobs will be to ensure that however employees want to be served —by bots or human interaction or a combination of both —their needs are met unquestioningly, seamlessly.

Virtual Trust: Secure Anywhere, Any-device Access

With the workplace becoming hundreds and thousands of remote workspaces, our employees will need to be productive on a variety of devices, regardless if they are on company-provided or BYOD devices. The vital foundation to our security strategy will be strong virtual protection for identity, device, data, apps and email. While the exponential rate at which the need to scale this will pose a challenge, the virtualization technology itself is table stakes. However, this move will bring with it an outcomes-first culture and, with all the monitoring for productivity and security, a renewed focus on employee privacy as a much-valued human right. This will serve to shore up trust.

But, what will it take to Switch to Virtualization On-Demand?

Now, that’s a question worth billions of dollars. Because the real challenge that looms before us is not virtualization. Thanks to the accelerating maturity of cloud solutions we’ve isolated the many benefits of coming together in one workplace to solve business problems, and found ways to stretch these benefits – even the intangible - to reach workers anytime and anywhere. With planning, with preparation, with the cloud as we know it, this is a problem we have solved before. Several times over. But are we truly prepared to tackle any contingencies that might emerge from an exponentially volatile public health situation again, and can we simply switch on-demand from the physical to the virtual? What elasticity of the cloud will that take? What is the ecosystem of resources and capabilities that must have ready to leverage on-demand? What is the stress test that our infrastructure must weather before we know it is ready to deliver? The overestimation of our digital readiness, seen only in the light of the short run, deters us from preparing further and if ever we are confronted with an exponentially accelerating situation, we discover too late that we might have underestimating the change. This is the preparedness paradox - when we feel ready to ride an exponential curve and as it takes off, we end up being underprepared. Can we evolve to help solve this for our talent value chains? This will mean taking a hard look at what we hope to achieve by being prepared – will this be driven by our desire to quickly restore the old equilibrium or rapidly embrace the new one? And in our response to that question lies our future - virtually.