This is a guest post by Michael Drescher, BroadVision’s Director of Business Operations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland
On 18th June, around 100 of the top Swiss enterprises joined IDC’s “Workplace of the Future” conference to listen, discuss, learn and enjoy a full day on what the workplace of the future may look like.
The keynote address from IDC identified four essential drivers for the workplace of the future
- Social Business
- Mobility
- Cloud Services
- Big Data
A key area of the information exchange focused around the subject, that the way we communicate, despite all our best intention, is still broken and ways to fix it. (IDC’s numbers – email usage as main communication tool will drop from today of 73% to under 45% within the next 12 months).
Swisscom presented a key initiative within the company, “WorkSmart”, concerning the ways the younger generation within Swisscom supports the change of working and what is important for them. Key factors for the young generation were identified as work at any place, with any device, sharing knowledge, spontaneously, direct and across an open network.
Other presentations focused more on hardware related topics or document centric approaches on how to address the future workplace.
Most of the questions from the audience and the forum panel discussion did focus around the points:
- Where to start and how to drive adoption of new selected approaches?
- Is it secure and how can I manage the information across the different devices?
- Is consolidation of all the already existing channels possible and how?
- Do we need more tools or just better manage what we have?
Agreement was reached among the participants:
- E-Mail handling needs to change
- BYOD and flexible work places are more and more an expectation for all organisations, not an option.
- We still need to get work done – chat, blogs, forum are all nice but we all do have workload to manage
- More independent tools will not do it – integrated communication and collaboration suites are required.
- The individual needs to drive/control the communication
We focused on presenting our approach on how to fix broken business communication, address the essential drivers of the future development and address work place change. We have brought this all together into our new product, we call Vmoso. You can try it out right away – just go to www.vmoso.com.
Photos reproduced with kind permission of IDC