Virtualizing the Way we Work On-demand!

COVID-19 forced us to ask the question: are we truly prepared to switch from the physical to the virtual, on-demand? It is no longer enough to digitize just our customer value chains. Our global work value chain - people interactions, processes, and systems - must become all-digital too.

But what does becoming ‘all-digital’ mean? What does virtualizing the way we work comprise? The answer is imagining and implementing innovative, digital solutions that equip a diverse set of distributed workers to collaborate, using all manner of devices, while securely accessing company and work resources anywhere/anytime with self-service support options. Furthermore, it requires adopting intelligent and elastic cloud infrastructure to support short- and long-term workplace strategies and capabilities that bring collaboration tools, automation, mobility, and analytics into the multiple remote workspaces that now make up our workplaces. Let me explain how:

First, transform the workplace to connect, collaborate, and co-create. Cloud-powered tactics for the team and ecosystem collaboration have become pervasive. In addition to anytime-anywhere collaboration suites and compute-on-the-go, data-led smart automation will enable massive personal productivity gains. Open-source suites enabled to deliver at enterprise scale and rigor will grow in adoption. What makes the most significant difference is a single destination, housing all these enablers that provide distributed users a common, shared context. With unified onboarding, a single app catalog, and enhanced user experience for accessing these services, the destination will improve collaboration significantly. Leveraging virtual desktops for productivity boosts will be widely recognized. It is also a quick, efficient, and secure path to scale IT for an expanding and distributed workforce, with the flexibility to ramp up or down at the speed of business. And, when complemented by a cloud environment to build and test applications, this enables the distributed workforce to build upon each other’s work simultaneously. 

Second, contextualize experiences for personas and devices. Our experiences as consumers have long been digitized and personalized. Apps and voice assistants that recognize us before they respond, no longer surprise us. But at work, employees are still waiting for their service experience to catch up. As personal and professional work environments blur in home offices, this expectation will increase. Consumer-grade experiences at work will become an inevitable eventuality. With remote workers spending their whole work week engaging with the applications they need to go about their tasks, a rich set of data will be generated and analyzed on the cloud. This can be easily leveraged to reimagine and design experiences based on each employee’s motivations, psychological traits, and context.

Next, power intelligent service and self-help. With remote workers accessing systems at unusual times and accessing systems they otherwise regularly didn’t, round-the-clock pressure on support teams will mount. Their capability will need to be amplified by technology. Intelligent self-service, with cloud elasticity, for employees, is the only way companies can drive service capacity higher and cost per service-request lower, even as the workforce scales. The results can drive a never-before always-on, always-reliable ecosystem of ready support for a workforce focused on delivering for the business. Intelligent AI-powered service desks and extreme automation in operations delivery will become the order of the day.

Finally, assure digital trust for the virtual ecosystem. We are looking at a future when we will need to move from less than 10 percent to 100 percent of our workforce in the virtual and remote working mode. This will not only expand the threat surface but also create new surfaces for an attack in the form of remote access infrastructure, remote access methods, collaboration platforms, and the like. The need to focus on modernizing our critical legacy systems to make them accessible remotely is urgent and real. So is the need to build new use cases to identify new attack and fraud patterns. Because, it’s the same technologies arming remote workers with powerful new virtualization capabilities that are also exposing them to new threats, that they need to be defended from.

With the right structure, culture, processes backing the right technology, virtualized work can boost productivity and morale. Employees who spend less time commuting and have better work-life balance are likely to be more productive, motivated, and ready to mobilize. At Infosys, we have been bringing together all these elements, for ourselves and our clients, to navigate a new way of working that will make us fit for the future.