The next BriefingsDirect intelligent workspaces discussion explores how businesses are looking to the latest digital technologies to transform how employees work.
There is a tremendous amount
of noise, clutter, and distraction in the scattershot, multi-cloud workplace of
today -- and it’s creating confusion and frustration that often pollute
processes and hinder innovative and impactful work.
We’ll now examine how IT
can elevate the game of sorting through apps, services, data, and delivery of
simpler, more intelligent experiences that enable people -- in any context -- to
work on relevancy and consistently operate at their informed best.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.
To illustrate new paths to the
next generation of higher productivity work, please welcome Marco Stalder,
Team Leader of Citrix Workspace Services at Bechtle AG, one of Europe's leading IT
providers, and Tim Minahan,
Executive Vice President of Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal
Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Tim,
improving the employee experience has become a hot
topic, with billions of productivity dollars at stake. Why has how workers
do or don't do their jobs well become such a
prominent issue?
Minahan: The
simple answer is the talent crunch. Just about everywhere you look, workforce,
management, and talent acquisition have become a C-suite level, if not board
level, priority.
 |
| Minahan |
And this really boils down to three
things. Number one, demographically there is not enough talent. You have heard
the numbers from McKinsey that within the next year there will be a
shortage of 95 million medium- to high-skilled workers around the globe. And that’s
being exacerbated by the fact that our traditional work models -- where we
build a big office building or a call center and try to hire people around it --
is fundamentally broken.
The second key reason is a skills
gap. Many companies are reengineering their business to drive digital
transformation and new digital business or engagement models with their
customers. But oftentimes their employee base doesn’t have the right skills and
they need to work on developing them.
The third issue exacerbating
the talent crunch is the fact that if you are fortunate enough to have the
talent, it’s highly likely they are disengaged at work. Gallup just did its
global Future
of Work Study and found that 85 percent of employees are either disengaged
or highly disengaged at work. A chief reason is they don’t feel they have
access to the information and the tools they need to get their jobs done effectively.
Gardner: We have
dissatisfaction, we have a hard time finding people, and we have a hard time
keeping the right people. What can we bring to the table to help solve that? Is
there some combination of what human resources (HR)
used to do and IT maybe didn’t think about doing but has to do?
Enhance the employee experience
Minahan: The concept
of employee experience is working its way into the corporate parlance. The chief
reason is that you want to be able to ensure the employees have the right
combination of physical space and an environment conducive with interacting and
partnering with their project teams -- and for getting work done.
Digital
spaces, right? That is not just access to technology, but a digital space
that is simplified and curated to ensure workers get the right information and
insights to do their jobs. And then, obviously, cultural considerations, such
as, “Who is my manager, what’s my development career, am I continuing to move
forward?”
Those three things are
combining when we talk about employee experience.
Gardner: And
you talked about the where, the physical environment. A lot of companies have experimented
with at-home workers, remote workers, and branch offices. But many have not gotten
the formula right. At the same time, we are seeing cities become very congested
and very expensive.
The
traditional work models of old just aren't working, especially in light
of the talent crunch and skills gap we're seeing. Traditional work
models are fundamentally broken.
Do we need to give people even
more choice? And if we do, how can we securely support that?
Minahan: The traditional
work models of old just aren’t working, especially in light of the talent crunch
and skills gap we are seeing. The high-profile example is Amazon, right? So
over the past year in the US there was a
big deal over Amazon selecting their second and third headquarters. Years
ago Amazon realized they couldn’t hire all the talent they needed in Seattle or
Silicon Valley or Austin. Now they have 17-odd tech centers around the US, with
anywhere from 400 to several thousand people at each one. So you need to go
where the talent is.
When we think about
traditional work models -- where we would build a call center and hire a lot of
people around that call center – it’s fundamentally broken. As evidence of
this, we did a study recently where we
surveyed 5,000 professional knowledge workers in the US. These were folks who
moved to cities because they had opportunities and they got paid more. Yet 70
percent of them said that they would move out of the city if they could have
more flexible work schedules and reliable connectivity.
Gardner: It’s
pretty attractive when you can get twice the house for half the money, still
make city wages, and have higher productivity. It’s a tough equation to beat.
Minahan: Yes,
there is that higher productivity thing, this whole concept of mindfulness
that’s working its way into the lingo. People should be hired to do a core job,
not spending their days doing things like expense report approvals, performance
reviews, or purchase requisitions. Yet those are a big part of everyone's job,
when they are in an office.
You compound that with two-hour
commutes, and that there are a lot of distractions in the office. We often need
to navigate multiple different applications just to get a bit of the information
that we need. We often need to navigate multiple different applications to get
a single business process done and that’s just not dealing with all the
different interfaces, it’s dealing with all the different authentications, and
so on. All of that noise in your day really frustrates workers. They feel they
were hired to do a job based on core skills they are really passionate about –
but they spend all their time doing task work.
Gardner: I
feel like I spend way too much time in email. I think everybody knows and feels
that problem. Now, how do we start to solve this? What can the technology side
bring to the table and how can that start to move into the culture, the methods,
and the rethinking of how work gets done?
De-clutter intelligently
Minahan: The simple
answer is you need to clear way the clutter. And you need to bring intelligence
to bear. We believe that artificial
intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
play a key role. And so Citrix
has delivered a digital
workspace that has three primary attributes.
First, it’s unified. Users and
employees gain everything they need to be productive in one unified experience.
Via single sign-on they gain access to all of their Software as a service
(SaaS) apps, web apps, mobile apps, virtualized apps, and all of their
content in one place. That all travels consistently with them wherever they are
-- across their laptop, to a tablet, to a smartphone, or even if they need to
log on from a distinct terminal.
The second component, in
addition to being unified, is being secure. When things are within
the workspace, we can apply contextual security policies based on who you are.
We know, for example, that Dana logs in every day from a specific network,
using his device. If you were to act abnormally or outside of that pattern, we
could apply an additional level of authentication, or some other rules like
shutting off certain functionalities such as downloading. So your applications and
content are far more secure inside of the workspace than outside.
When
things are within the workspace, we can apply contextual security
policies based on who you are. Your applications and content are far
more secure inside of the workspace than outside.
The third component,
intelligence, gets to the frustration part for the employees. Infusing ML and
simplified workflows -- what we call micro apps -- within
the workspace brings in a lot of those consumer-like experiences, such as curating
your information and news streams, like Facebook.
Or, like Netflix, it provides
recommendations on the content you would like to see.
We can bring that into the
workspace so that when you show up you get presented in a very personalized way
the insights and tasks that you need, when you need them, and remove that noise
from your day so you can focus on your core job.
Gardner:
Getting that triage based on context and that has a relevancy to other team processes
sounds super important.
When it comes to IT, they may have
been part of the problem. They have just layered on more apps. But IT is
clearly going to be part of the solution, too. Who else needs to play a role
here? How else can we re-architect work other than just using more technology?
To get the job done, ask employees how
Minahan: If
you are going to deliver improved employee experiences, one of the big mistakes
a lot of companies make is they leave out the employee. They go off and
craft the great employee experience and then present it to them. So definitely
bring employees in.
When we do research and engage
with customers who prioritize on the employee experience, it’s usually a union
between IT and human resources to best understand what the work is that an
employee needs to get done. What’s the preferred environment? How do they want
to work? With that understanding, you can ensure you are adapting the digital
workspaces -- and the physical workplaces -- to support that.
Gardner: It
certainly makes sense in theory. Let’s learn how this works in practice.
Marco, tell us about Bechtle, what you have
been doing, and why you made solving employee productivity issues a priority.
 |
| Stalder |
Stalder:
Bechtle AG is one of Europe’s leading IT providers. We currently have about 70
systems integrators (SIs) across Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, as well as
e-commerce businesses in 14 different European countries.
We were founded in 1983 and
our company headquarters is in Neckarsulm, a small town in
the southern part of Germany. We currently have 10,300 employees spread across
all of Europe.
As an IT company, one of our
key priorities is to make IT as easy as possible for the end users. In the past,
that wasn't always the case because the priorities had been set in the wrong
place.
Gardner: And
when you say the priorities were set in the wrong place, when you tried to
create the right requirements and the right priorities, how did you go about
that, what were the top issues you wanted to solve?
Stalder: The
hard part is gaining the balance between security and user experience. In the
past, priorities were more focused on the security part. We have tried to shift
this through our Corporate Workspace
Project to give the user the right kind of experience back again, and letting
it show in the work and focus on what the user has to do.
Gardner: And just to be clear, are we talking about the users that are just within your corporation or did this extend also to some of your clients and how you interact with them?
Stalder: The
primary focus was our internal user base, but of course we also have
contractors that externally have to access our data and our applications.
Gardner: Tim,
this is yet another issue companies are dealing with: contingent workforces,
contractors that come and go, and creative people that are often on another
continent. We have to think about supporting that mix of workers, too.
Synchronizing the talent pool
Minahan: Absolutely.
We are seeing a major shift in how companies think of the workforce, between
full-time and part-time contractors, and the like. Leading companies are looking
around for pools of talent. They are asking, “How do I organize the right
skills and resources I need? How do I bring them together in an environment, whether
it’s physical or digital, to collaborate around a project and then dissolve
them when that project is complete?”
And these new work models excite
me when we talk about the workspace opportunity that technology can enable. A great
example is a customer of ours, eBay, which
people are familiar with. A long time ago, eBay recognized that they could not
get ahead of the older call center model. They kept training people, but the turnover
was too fast. So they began using the Citrix Workspace
together with some of our networking technologies to go to where the employees
are.
Now they can go to the
stay-at-home parent in Montana, the retiree in Florida, or the gig worker in
New York. In this way, they can Uberfy
the call center model by giving them, regardless of location, the applications,
knowledge base, and reliable connectivity they need. So when you or I call in,
it sounds like we are calling into a call center, and we get the answers we
need to solve our problems.
Gardner:
Marco, your largely distributed IT organization has permeable boundaries. There
isn’t a hard wall between you and where your customers start and end. The
Citrix Workspace helped you solve that. What were some of the other problems,
and what was the outcome?
Stalder: One
of the main criteria for Bechtle is agility. We have been growing constantly for
the last 36 years. Bechtle started as a small company with only 100 employees,
but organic and inorganic growth continues, and we are still growing
quite rapidly. We just acquired
another four companies at the end of last year, for example, with 400 to 500
employees. We need to on-board them quickly.
One
of the main criteria for Bechtle is agility. We have been growing
constantly for the last 36 years. And our teams are spread around
different office locations. We also have to adapt to new technologies
rapidly because we want to be ahead of the technology.
And our teams are spread around
different office locations; even my team, for example. I am based in
Switzerland with four people. Another part of our group is in Germany, and I
have one colleague in Budapest. Giving all of these people the correct and
secure access to all of their applications and data is definitely key.
As an IT company, we also have
to adapt to new technologies rapidly and quickly, probably faster than other
companies because we want to be ahead of the technology for our employees. We are
selling these same
solutions to our customers, along with the same experience -- and a good
experience.
Gardner: We often
call that drinking your own champagne. Tell us about the process through which
you evaluated the Citrix Workspace solution and why that’s proven so powerful.
One platform to rule them all
Stalder: In
early 2016, we began with a high-level design for a basic corporate workspace. We
began with an on-premises design, like a lot of companies. Then we were introduced
to something called Citrix
Cloud services by our partner manager in Germany.
In January 2017, we started to
think about the Citrix Cloud solution as an interesting addition to what we were
already planning. And we quickly realized that the team I am leading -- we are six
to eight people with limited resources – could only deliver all those services
out to our end users with help. The Citrix Cloud services were a perfect fit
for the project we wanted to do.
There are different reasons.
One is standardization, to build and use one platform to access all of our
applications, data, and services. Another is flexibility. While most of our workloads
are currently in our own data centers in Germany, we are also thinking about bringing
workloads and data out to the cloud. It doesn’t matter if it’s Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or you name it.
Another benefit, of course, is
scalability. As I said, we have been growing a lot and we are going to grow a
lot more in the future. We really need to be able to scale out, and it doesn’t
matter where the workload is going to be or where the data is going to be at
the end.
And, as an IT company, we are
facing another issue. We are selling different kinds of IT products to our
customers, and people tend to like to use the product they are selling to their
customers. So we have to explore and use different kinds of applications for different
tasks.
For example, we use Microsoft
Teams, Cisco WebEx Teams,
as well as Skype for Business.
We are using many other kinds of applications, too. That perfectly fits into
what we have seen [from Citrix at their recent
Synergy conference keynote]. It brings it all together in the Citrix Workspace
using micro apps and micro services.
Another important attribute is
efficiency. As I said before, with seven or eight IT support people, we cannot
build very complex and large things. You have to focus on doing things very efficiently.
Another really important thing
for us as we set up the workspaces project is engaging with the executive
board of Bechtle. If we find that those people are not standing behind the
idea and understanding what we are trying to do, then the project is definitely
going to fail.
It was not that easy, just telling
those board people what we would like to do. We had to build a proof of concept
system to let them see, touch, and feel it themselves. Only in this way can one
really understand it.
Gardner: Of
course, such solutions are a team sport. You don’t just buy this out of the box.
Digital transformation doesn’t come with a pretty ribbon on it. How did you go
about creating this workspace?
There is IT in team
Stalder: It
was via teamwork spread between different kinds of groups. We have been working
very closely with Citrix
Consulting Services in Germany, for example. We have been working together
with the engineers within our business units who are selling and implementing
those solutions within our customers.
And another very important
part, in my opinion, was not just engaging the Citrix people, but also engaging
with the application owners. It doesn’t really help if I give them a very nice virtual
desktop and they are able to log-on fast but they don’t have any
applications on it. Or the application doesn’t work very well. Or if they have
to log-on again, for example, or configure it before using it. We tried to provide
an end-to-end solution by engaging with all of the different people -- from the
front-end client, to the networking, and through to the applications’ back end.
And we have been quite
successful. For example, for our main business applications, SAP or Microsoft, we have been telling the
people what we want to do to get those application guys on board. They understand
what it means for them. In the past we had been rolling out version updates for
70 different locations.
They were sending out emails saying,
“Can you please go to the next version? Can you please update to this or that?”
That, of course, requires a lot of time and is very hard to troubleshoot and configure.
But now, by standardizing those
things together [as a workspace], we can deploy it once, configure it once, and
it doesn’t matter who is going to use it. It has made those rollouts much
easier. For example, for our virtual apps and desktops, we just reached about
30 percent of our employees. It's being done in a highly standardized project basis
across every business unit.
We also realized the
importance of informing and guiding the people as to how they have to use the
new solutions, because it’s changing and some people, they react a bit slow to change.
At first they say, “I don’t want to try it. I don’t need it.” It was a learning
process to see what kind of documentation and guidance the people needed.
The changes are simple things
[that deliver big paybacks]. Because if the people can take a PC back home and
use a VPN to connect to their company resources, they may no longer need that PC.
They can simply use any device to access their work from home or from on the
road. Those are very simple things, but people have to understand that they can
do that now.
Gardner: As I
like to say, we used to force people to conform to the apps and now we can get
the apps and services to conform to what the people want and need.
But we have talked about this
in terms of the productivity of the employee. How about your IT department? How
have your IT people reacted to this?
Stalder: I also
needed a lot of time to convince the IT people, especially some security guys.
They said, “You are going to go to Citrix Cloud? What does it mean for security?”
We have been working very
closely with Citrix to explain to the security officer what kind of data goes
to the cloud, how it’s stored, and how it’s processed. And that took quite a
while to get approval, but at the end it went through, definitely.
The IT guys have to understand
and use the solution. They sometimes think that it’s just for the end users. But
IT is also an end user. They have to get on board and use the solutions. Only in
this way everyone knows what the other one is talking about.
Gardner: Now
that you have been through this process and the workspace is in place,
what have you found? What are the metrics of success? When you do it well, what
do you get back?
Positive feedback
Stalder: Unfortunately,
measuring productivity is very hard to do. I don’t have any numbers on that yet.
I just get feedback from employees who are talking about different things as they
try the system.
And I have quite an
interesting story. For example, one guy in our application consulting group was
a bit skeptical. One day his notebook PC was broken so he had to use the new Citrix
Workspace. He had no choice but to try it.
He wrote back some very
interesting facts and figures, saying it was faster. It was faster to log on and
the applications started faster. And it was easy to use. Because he does a lot
of presentations and training, he realized he could start the work on one
device and then switch back to another device, maybe in the meeting room or go
to the training room, and just continue the work.
We also get feedback saying
they can work from everywhere, can access everything they need, especially if
they go out to the customer, and that they only have to remember one place to
log on to. They just log-on once and they have all the data and all the
applications they are going to need.
Gardner: Tim,
when you hear about such feedback from Marco, what jumps out at you?
Minahan: What
stands out is the universal challenge we are all experiencing now. The employee
experience is less than adequate in most organizations. It is impacting not
only the ability to develop and retain great talent, but it’s also impacting
your overall business.
What also stands out is that when
technology is harnessed in a way that puts the employee first -- and drives
superior experience to allow them to have access to the information and the
tools they need to get their jobs done -- not only does employee retention go
up, but you also drive better customer experiences, and better business end results.
The third thing that stands
out is the recognition that traditionally we in the IT sector focused on putting
security in the way of the experience. Now, if you put the employee at the
center, we are beginning to attain a better
balance between experience and security. It’s not an either-or equation
anymore. This story at Bechtle is a great example of that in reality.
Gardner: What was interesting for me, too, was that employees get used to the way things are. You hit inertia. But when a necessity crops up, and somebody was forced to try something new, they found that there are better ways to do things.
Minahan: Right,
it’s the old saw … If you only asked folks what they wanted, they would want a
faster horse -- and we never would have had the car.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Citrix.
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