Digital Workplace Deep Dive

What happens when you measure the experience of your employees and your customers? This is the 3rd in the series of episodes dedicated to understanding end user experience. In this podcast, Alan Nance (CEO and co-founder of CitrusCollab) shares some powerful examples from enterprises who have benefited from measuring experience – going beyond SLAs to true XLAs that enable powerful engagement.

For more information on CitrusCollab’s recommendations for measuring experience, go to XLA Collab

For more information on Unisys approach to Digital Workplace Services, please visit this interactive site: https://www.unisys.com/digitalworkplace

What popular trend in IT works against a great work experience? Standardization. In its effort to create efficiency, it is also creating a bad work experience. How do we balance the IT cost savings that standardization brings with the desire to give employees a great work experience that lets them bring real value to the company? Traditional Managed Services contracts are focused on cost reduction. But the money saved in IT is irrelevant when looking at the success of the enterprise as a whole. It is also a mistake to think of personas as IT roles. Instead, we need to understand the real personas that participate in the delivery of the service and make sure each person has what they need to participate in that service. This enables IT to open the door for new revenue and new services. This is part 2 of a 3 part series on End User Experience. In part 3 we will look at how to measure ‘experience’ in a way that brings real results.

For more information in Unisys approach to Digital Workplace Services, please visit this interactive site: https://www.unisys.com/digitalworkplace

What is the connection between employee experience and company profitability and growth? How do we get the benefits of standardization and diversity at the same time? The growing interest in ‘experience’ (both for employees and customers) is driving some interesting changes in how we deliver IT services. We’ve come a long way in standardizing and measuring IT services. How do we continue to get the benefits of that while also providing great experiences at work? Alan Nance, CEO of CitrusCollab and member of the team that created ITIL 1.0, shares his thoughts on the importance of End User Experience, choosing to replace the term "End User" with a more forward thinking term, "Prosumer". He reveals what we’ve learned about End User Experience during the pandemic – and in so doing, redefines what we must include as part of the Digital Workplace.

The CEO of Unisys, Peter Altabef, shares his view of EUX and how it is an integral part of the future of work in this blog.

Will public sector soon become an attractive place for millenials to work? What did the public sector IT do really well during the pandemic? What will change forever in public sector as a result of the pandemic? What challenges does public sector face with 30% of their employees being eligible to retire? To answer these questions, Shawn Kingsberry draws on his experience in providing IT services for several state governments and his time as CIO of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board for the US Federal Government. I think that you’ll find his insights both interesting and useful. Together, Shawn and I look at what makes the public sector different from commercial enterprises, how many state governments made rapid changes during the pandemic, and what changes are yet to come in public sector as a reaction to the pandemic.

Links to additional content relating to public sector:
https://www.unisys.com/industries/government/public-sector
https://www.unisys.com/digitalworkplace

In 2019, ISG’s Director of Digital Solutions and Strategy, Iain Fisher, shared with me 6 important workplace initiatives. That was before the Pandemic seemed to change everything. Looking back, which of those initiatives are even more important today as we continue to deal with the pandemic? Which have dropped in priority? Which will be important as we move into the post-pandemic world?

Did you have everything you needed the moment you stepped into the office? Onboarding is hard. Automating it is even harder. What about automating the offboarding process? Now, pick 20-30 tasks you do regularly and think about automating those. In this episode, Paer Johansson shares the insightful best practices that he has collected while using design thinking to automate business and IT processes for scores of enterprises. He also gives some guidance on what makes a process a good candidate for automation, when you should not automate something, and lastly, he shares his vision on the next wave of innovation in automation. I hope you enjoy listening to Paer as much as I did in recording this session with him.

Paer Johansson

Paer is Director of IT Management Platforms in EMEA. He is responsible for innovation, operation, and integration of ITSM solutions in EMEA for Unisys Digital Workplace Services.​

Link to Digital Workplace Home Page https://www.unisys.com/digitalworkplace

Link to Paer’s list of 3 service management automation pitfalls https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/servicenow-implementations-3-common-pitfalls-paer-johansson-mba/

What makes the High Tech Industry different from Finance, Health Care, Transportation, or Manufacturing? Are High Tech companies better at using technology than other industries? As a result of the pandemic, what is changing/must change within High Tech companies in order for them to remain relevant? Barb Stinnett, CEO and founder of Timmaron Group, shares her vast experience in working for and with many of the major IT companies that have shaped the 21st century.

Links to the resources mentioned in the podcast:

VirtuWerk home page: Technologies and services to help companies plan, prepare and implement a resilient and engaged workplace.
https://timmarongroup.com/virtuwerk/

VirtuWerk webinar registration page: A series of briefings and resources focused on learning how to adapt and thrive in the “new norm”.

Most enterprises see themselves going through distinct phases as the deal with the pandemic. The first phase for many was enabling employees to work from home. The second phase that quickly followed has been focusing on the health and productivity of employees working from home. There is an expectation that Phase 3 will be the ‘new normal’. But is there a 4th phase? And is it possible to learn and grow from our collective experience in dealing with all of the phases of this pandemic? This episode looks at the importance of getting past fear and into learning. Only when that is accomplished can we grow. Lynn Herbert, the Chief Customer Officer at Timmaron Group, draws from her experience in consulting for scores of enterprises in multiple industries on this very subject.

Links to the resources mentioned in the podcast:

VirtuWerk home page: Technologies and services to help companies plan, prepare and implement a resilient and engaged workplace.

VirtuWerk webinar registration page: A series of briefings and resources focused on learning how to adapt and thrive in the “new norm”.

VirtuWerk – The Future of Work webinar: Early successes in creating a resilient and engaged workplace. How to redefine what work needs to be done, where, when and how it can be done. A look at real world examples of problems faced, problems solved and early successes in response to the pandemic. (webinar password is “bluejay” with no quotes).

Why is Natural Language Processing so difficult to get right? Are there any shortcuts? And what are the tradeoffs between supervised and unsupervised learning? Yes, this episode of the podcast is a bit more technical than some of the earlier episodes. But if NLP is your thing, you’ll enjoy hearing part 2 of my series on this subject with Brian Evarts, who leads the development of Natural Language Processing at Unisys.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) promises to provide a friendly, alternative way for humans to interact with IT and business systems. Brian Evarts, who leads the development of Natural Language Processing at Unisys, explains the three ways that NLP improves the end user experience when getting help from the Service Desk. In doing so, he reveals the steps he takes to train AI to recognize the intent of a human utterance. He also looks into the future of NLP, predicting which combination of technologies will be required to provide the next level of human-like conversational ability. This episode is the first in a two part series on NLP.