PHOTO:
Benjamin Disinger | unsplash
Like many, Iâve been pondering what life will be like post-pandemic. Itâs become almost trite to ask, âWhat will be the new normal?â
There are so many ways to look at this question. How far will business travel rebound to pre-pandemic levels? How will we decide who will be allowed to continue remote work? How will organizations deal with the myriad legal complexities of âreasonable accommodationâ among a hybrid virtual/on-premises workforce? How will automated and distanced emergency short-term process changes map into long-term process innovation? What gaps have appeared in our information security and governance systems during the rush to deploy these systems that must now be addressed before they snowball?
PHOTO:
Denys Nevozhai
Work is becoming increasingly more complex for knowledge workers. Everything is evolving, from external factors driven by customer and regulator demands, to the internal environment which includes colleagues, knowledge and software tools.
To help employees handle these challenges, companies have been providing them with an increasing array of digital tools which further complicate the digital environment. After a while, this complexity starts to have a negative effect not only on employee productivity, but on customer interactions. Over the years I have often traced operational or customer experience problems back to poorly designed digital employee experience.
In short, workplace complexity is one of the biggest challenges for modern workers.
Collaboration platforms (e.g. Teams or Slack).
As you can see, this is quite a short list for a specific example. Many of you who may feel as if you re drowning in tool options may likely read that list and wish yours was that short!
So the digital workplace can be a broad, expansive and complex environment, well beyond the idea of an intranet site with some linked applications.
No-Code Tools and the Digital Workplace
One place where we may see some continuous evolution this year, helping to move the needle on improving productivity is the continued acceptance of no-code or low-code development platforms and the idea of the business user as âcitizen developer.â My column last October covered, The Risks and Rewards of the Citizen Developer Approach. If we follow the approaches described in that article to mitigate risks, no-code platforms can bring great potential to the workplace, allowing business subject matter experts to develop business logic to improve specific
PHOTO:
NASA
After years of hearing more vendor sales pitches than is healthy for me, Iâm convinced most pitches fall into two why categories. The first why is a pitch so abstract and high-level that it sounds like the technology equivalent of achieving world peace, with nary a mention of the how to actually pursue this nirvana. The second why pitch focuses on the technology itself â replete with elaborate technology stack diagrams â with scarcely a mention of the actual business benefits that might be tied to the technology. Also missing is any substantial discussion of what actually happens to connect the layers of those beautiful stack diagrams â another key missing how.