As organisations adjust to a rapid shift in the way we work, digital business transformation initiatives have enabled businesses to support their newly remote workforces with smart workplace solutions, such as business automation, content services and virtual collaboration tools.
However, as businesses consider work environments in the new normal, they must ensure that their digital transformation projects continue to align with their long-term hybrid workplace goals. Choosing the right technologies and processes to support your employees to work from anywhere, at any time, will ensure future success and business growth.
Here are three digital business transformation initiatives organisations can implement now to support the growth and success of a long-term hybrid work environment.
1. Break down silos
Collaboration and communication should need to be on the agenda to enable a hybrid workforce. Business silos are the antithesis of this and remote working is likely to exacerbate any existing silos if a conscious effort isn’t made to overcome them.
While teams are important for the daily functioning of an organisation, when they don’t talk or collaborate, this is likely to affect innovation, growth and an organisation’s ability to pivot quickly in response to market opportunities and the changing business environment.
Thankfully, there are tools to help you overcome business silos, such as Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions. An ECM enables your organisation to create a central repository of all company information, ensuring every one of your employees is on the same page. They can automate workflows, enabling and streamlining collaboration between teams.
Not only that, but an ECM drives other business transformation initiatives by harnessing the power of the complex data and assets that your organisation manages. You can find more information on the benefits of an ECM and how to choose the right one for your business here.
2. Digitise your assets
A second digital business transformation initiative to support an organisation's hybrid workplace strategy is a digitisation project. Even before the rise in remote working, many organisations were beginning to reduce their reliance on printed documents with paperless offices that offer time and cost-savings.
However, hybrid work environments have made digitisation of paper documents more critical than ever to the everyday functioning of businesses. With employees working across multiple locations, creating, capturing and managing information digitally is essential for efficient, productive and effective completion of tasks. And tools such as e-signatures and version control make using digital documents easier than ever.
There are four steps to implementing a paperless office strategy:
- Identification of the content you need to convert
- Preparation of the documents for scanning in a systematic manner
- Scanning with a method that suits your needs
- Data Capture and digital storage of documents in a content management solution, such as an ECM
3. Integrate your systems
Organisations rely on multiple systems to function. Business management, accounting, supply chain, content management, sales, marketing, virtual collaboration—all of these areas need software to operate. As a result, one of the biggest challenges businesses face in digital transformation is integrating different technologies together. And in 2020, with organisations rapidly adopting multiple new platforms to support hybrid workplaces, this issue is only likely to be more pertinent.
Integration is vital for enabling a cohesive system that achieves better business outcomes than the individual platforms. The increasing complexity of business data, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and other evolving technologies mean that traditional integration tools no longer suffice. Instead, Gartner recommends a Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) approach to empower digital transformation.
A HIP is a central location for all the integration functionalities that ensure the smooth operation of your business. It involves a shift towards increased self-service integration capabilities for different lines of business, subsidiaries, application development teams and users. In particular, your HIP should encompass four dimensions:
- Personas, such as specialists, developers and general users
- Integration domains, such as application, data and process
- Endpoints, such as remote working devices, the cloud, IoT
- Deployment models, such cloud, on-premise and hybrid systems
As your business adopts new systems to support your hybrid workforce, an integration initiative is critical for achieving the most effective digital work environment.
Building a resilient and productive hybrid work environment requires the right hardware, software and processes. Download our Guide to Hybrid Workplace Strategy for a step-by-step strategy for implementing an effective hybrid work model that equips your employees to work anywhere, any time.
