The office of the future according to Microsoft, Avanade, rhipe, Brennan IT and more

Propelled by rising property costs and a perception they must be seen as ‘cool’ to attract millennials, organisations are deploying technology to help ditch designated desks and build workplaces of the future.
CRN hosted this discussion of industry leaders to find out their view of the office of tomorrow.

Guests
Sarah Adam-Gedge, MD, Avanade
Simon Barlow, executive GM, Brennan IT
Rob Kingma, MD, ICT Networks
Justin Morris, country manager, Modality Systems
Shane Muller, managing director, OBT
Caerl Murray, head of sales, Ricoh IT
Mark Pace, director, Sterling IT
Gordon Pettigrew, director (alliances), Generation-e
Ed Phillips, GM, Dimension Data
Claire Walker, marketing manager, WebVine

SPONSORS
Warren Nolan, chief commercial officer, rhipe
Ian Heard, digital workplace & collaboration GM, Microsoft
Tony Wilkinson, director commercial partner business, Microsoft
David Nicol, director cloud services and new business, Citrix

Facilitator
Nate Cochrane, CRN

Creating the workplace of the future is more than transforming the office

Tony Wilkinson, Microsoft
Future workplaces can change fundamentals of how cities work and how we distribute people around the continent. If you don’t have to be physically located somewhere to work effect­ively, that changes community and everything else about how you work.

Warren Nolan, rhipe
Digital transformation means different things to different people. We provide our partners with products and services to assemble bespoke solutions to create modern workplaces. But in creating flexibility, we must add processes to stay in touch with our people and communicate among teams that once sat beside each other in an office. So we create flexibility but also the need for more governance.

Ian Heard, Microsoft
Customers see their workplace as a moment-in-time strategy to revisit in five to 10 years. And their virtual workspace is an evolution to keep evergreen and attract millennials. Our partner audit firm, EY, now offers ‘real estate as a service’ to their business units; there’s no property budget because they track who moves around the office and what teams don’t go into the office and charge them accordingly. Knitting the virtual and physical will revamp how we think about workspaces and real estate costs.

The way we think about real estate is changing

Gordon Pettigrew, Generation-e
It's changing because organisations no longer invest in their real estate and fit out – “I’m just going to consume or rent that from somebody else. I’ll give them that problem of making it attractive, delivering the right services.” So the construction industry is disrupted by changing real estate models. And as to security, there’s huge opportunity for change management because the weak point is the people.

Claire Walker, WebVine
Do you think that’s exacerbated by the casualisation of the workforce? There might be a lot of offshoring; we can’t be sure of their training. We can’t be sure of their physical security. I wonder if that’s making people a lot more nervous.

What does the 'future workplace' mean to you?

Mark Pace, Sterling IT
Our clients tend to work at different hours, so it’s not a nine-to-five job anymore, and being able to respond to customers’ requests or customers’ customers’ requests in a timely manner [is important].

Ed Phillips, Dimension Data
We see the digital workplace as a strategic asset and an innovation platform.

Workplace transformation can be a cultural challenge

Shane Muller, OBT
I first ask the client if they or their workers had any views on this project because there are groups within groups with viewpoints of change. Change is very high risk because you may rally people on and charge ahead, but other times it’s a dogfight.
We go further to understand people’s roles. Culture on different continents is different. Culture around generations is different. Culture around the role of a person and their title or status is a factor. Each of those have a varying outcome – and it’s uncontrollable. So we would have looked at the data in those different metrics.

CRN: How do you gather the data?

Shane Muller, OBT
We probably would not do a hard-data fact-find, but what we call a ‘feel find’. We spend time with people to focus on the ‘feeling’ element and identify influencers – sometimes they’re three or 10 levels down the org chart – who could have a significant impact.

David Nicol, Citrix
Are these existing customers that you have an opportunity to understand and know their people because you’re taking them on that transformation journey?

Shane Muller, OBT
It’s usually new but most people are not open to, “OK let’s come in and engage; get to know my people”. Often staff engagement is tied to a tick box: “Yes, we’ve done it”. It’s very difficult to have a tick box in relation to a particular person.

Think of the humans

Sarah Adam-Gedge, Avanade
Data’s important, but if you use human-centred design you realise success is about the role and impact of technology on that person.
What’s their track through the workplace as opposed to somebody who only comes in once a month? What’s their experience like compared to their home office?

Flexibility is not necessarily good for work-life balance

Simon Barlow, Brennan IT
What is the customer’s motivation to move to a workplace of the future? If you can’t sell that motivation, it’s never going to work. A big challenge of “You can work anywhere at any time you want it” is an expectation that they’re always on.
People say, “I stopped driving to work because on the train I do a couple of hours work on the way in”. That’s not good. We’re making people’s hours longer and opening up to massive cyber risk.

Customers don't always know what they want

Caerl Murray, Ricoh IT
Enterprises do a lot of research and tell you what they want, but SMBs don’t know what they want. They want you to tell them.

Justin Morris, Modality
We should continue to be advocates and trusted advisors in workplace transformations because that’s what our customers come to us for. They say, “We don’t know what we want. Just give us what is best practice and what’s going to set us up for the future.”

Sarah Adam-Gedge, Avanade
If you want to be fabulous in your customer experience, you must be an awesome digital organisation.
If you want to be great on the external side – digital on the outside – you must be digital on the inside, and that underpins why the workplace of the future is a phenomenon.

A successful transformation might require multiple partners

Justin Morris, Modality
We co-founded Cloud Collective with Antares and Quorum, to deliver transformation for midmarket clients. We now have a specialised conversation with people involved with client strategy through to onboarding.
Cloud Collective has partnered with physical space specialists designing activity-based workspaces – what does a breakout area or meeting room look like? What’s the right equipment to go there? And what services [are needed] for a virtual meeting, and how do people schedule them?
It’s feeding off the digital experience and how it manifests in physical space as well as having that partnership.

Risk and opportunity

Ian Heard, Microsoft
There’s a huge opportunity in risk and security, to partner with the typical risk and audit businesses, like the big four.
Customers are coming into these management consultancies and saying, “I want you to underwrite my organisational risk, which includes cybersecurity”.

Ed Phillips
Now there are more parties involved when you do a digital workplace transformation, such as business change management organisations.

Sarah Adam-Gedge
In the case of our client Treasury Wine Estates, which we enabled to collaborate globally, everybody – whether in manufacturing, distribution or selling – collaborates to provide customer service. So, that takes a lot of time and waste out.

Bed down with users to avoid revolt

Sarah Adam-Gedge
We encourage millennials, who lead the way. We have ‘white glove’ activities where you sit with a leader who is embarrassed or unsure how to start.
If you see leaders working collaboratively in the new workspaces, that has a huge bearing on adoption. We also have user-adoption checkpoints to see how technology is used. How can we improve that? How can people enjoy it more?

Justin Morris
When we execute a workplace of the future, we don’t want to have a disruptive user experience where people revolt and say, “We want the old system back”, as debilitating as that was.

Users will sometimes walk their own path

Rob Kingma, ICT Networks
We’re an infrastructure organisation, so we deliver a transformation component. We’ve had a very successful delivery then learned later that users refused it. Users find ways to do their work and if we don’t deliver, they’ll deliver it themselves.
So we like to get involved early, to get a full understanding of the project to dovetail what we do. But these are often technology, not transformation, projects. A management group decided outcomes and, rather than trust and share, they ask us for a deliverable.
We all know what we do intimately and what we can deliver but clients don’t take advantage and that tends to create gaps because we can do things that perhaps they hadn’t thought of.

Ian Heard
Customers struggle with the question, “What are you solving for?” when considering agile workspaces. They say, “I want the best mobile unified communications experience.”
And you say, “We’re going to get you the best phone, best video experience in a mobile environment.” But ask the CEO – he wants a connected organisation because that drives valuation. That’s a very different outcome you’re solving for but they’re on the same RFP.

Good Security hygiene is a matter of context

David Nicol, Citrix
Our partners help customers with ‘contextual’ access, so it should be transparent how a service is delivered to them. If they’re on a device connecting from a public wi-fi to a SaaS application, that could be launched in a ‘virtual’ browser to protect the data. Or perhaps restrict access, ensuring the user knows why.
As to efficiency, Citrix customer John Holland significantly transformed and its CIO said the user was core to their IT strategy. The benefits they got from tablets in the hands of engineers at construction sites saved thousands of dollars a minute, [compared with] a site manager having to go back to the office to get drawings.

Warren Nolan
We’re creating these different environments without the walls of the office building; we’re putting people in their own homes, and in public spaces where they work in a flexible environment. That requires governance and security, so out of complexity comes opportunity.
Smaller customers want an enterprise-grade solution that’s secure, accessible, traceable and cheap.

People are the weak link

Simon Barlow
It’s about that cyber resilience of the business. What will we do? How to react? And what policy will mitigate? People are the weak link and anybody who doesn’t want to spend money on educating their people – as opposed to installing technology on the back end – sets them up for failure. So education is a massive part of the change management program.

Caerl Murray
You’re dealing with people who are not IT savvy-enough. They constantly say, “How do I make sure this never happens again?” And the answer is, we’ll prevent as much as possible but it may still happen again. You talk to the buyer about what’s at risk because SMBs won’t have the same governance compliance for enterprise clients. Clients that have had experiences will have a higher risk profile as well.

Everyone must be responsible for security

Warren Nolan, rhipe
We have Trend Micro and Symantec in the portfolio but security doesn’t come only from specialist vendors. Citrix has security elements, as does Microsoft on Azure. When creating a more secure digital workplace, we should consider how we assemble components.

Mark Pace, Sterling IT
With Microsoft products, we provide enterprise solutions to small organisations and SMBs. We’re serious about security and data protection. If a customer worries about price when we talk security, they shouldn’t be in business because their business could fail tomorrow.
But some smaller clients allow BYOD and, while enterprises deploy applications on their devices to lock them down, SMBs don’t have the tools and don’t want to spend. Securing at the wall, at home and remote offices is straightforward but BYOD is still a challenge with SMBs.