Partner Article

Work Wise Week

Earlier this month we celebrated Work Wise Week here in the UK, it’s a great chance to look at ways that organisations can boost productivity and efficiency. Work Wise UK, the development organisation behind Work Wise Week, is encouraging actions such as smarter travel, virtual meetings, mobile working and working remotely to explore how you can improve ways of working.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen the emergence of bring your own device (BYOD) and bring your own applications (BYOA) which has driven innovation across all parts of the business. It has empowered employees to use the devices and apps of their choice which help them work most productively, increasing their job satisfaction. Whilst for CIOs, it has served as a way to save costs and create a more agile workforce. With mobile working now commonplace, businesses need to understand the importance of having good technology to support their workforce. With employees working on the move and from different locations, it’s essential that they’re able to work with the speeds and access to data as though they were still located in the central office.

As we move towards a culture of smarter working, it’s a great opportunity to review the technology your organisation has in place and how it helps to meet business objectives. Though it presents endless opportunities, that doesn’t mean you should go down the route of certain technologies “for technology’s sake”. It’s important to create a vision for the technologies you roll out within your company. That vision must be based on employees understanding, appreciating and enjoying a technology. Technology vendors should take note of these three principles because they translate into adoption from employees and then customers. A modern hybrid enterprise – with digital at its core – takes these commitments seriously. Furthermore, it needs to have visibility and control over technologies so they can optimise them to ensure employees never notice performance issues. This contributes to the user experience whilst using an application. Employee faith in the company’s technology solutions is critical, otherwise they will turn to other options, creating “Shadow IT,” which will only create more complications for the IT department.

With this in mind, Work Wise Week serves not only as an opportunity to discover ways to work smarter, but also to take a look at the investments organisations are making towards supporting a smarter workforce.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Riverbed Technology .