Our working lives are being reshaped by a new generation of remote workers – who no longer see "work" as a place they go to but as something that happens, anywhere and from any device.Cloud is one of the key technologies on which this new digital workplace is being built, helping to deliver a broad range of digital transformation strategies in organisations of all size and in all sectors.
In fact, the sheer number of possibilities for how your organisation could move forward can be bewildering, You can use cloud to:
- Create a Digital Workplace that fosters collaboration. Many business processes haven’t changed much in the last 30 years. We’re following much the same steps and the same paper trail. A cloud-based digital workplace will take you beyond automation, changing the way you work and think. With a collaborative digital workplace, you can easily create, comment on and approve content at the same time and in real time, as well as more easily access files, knowledge and insights. All that helps to breakdown departmental and location silos and encourage better team working.
- Create a Digital Workplace that connects mobile frontline workers and homeworkers. Cloud-based tools that run in the browser allow your team to work remotely — on any device, from any place, at any time. Social tools and video chats let people communicate effectively even when they’re no longer in the same location. And cloud-based solutions like Google Workspace let you connect people securely while making it easier to support mobile and remote users and manage their devices — at a fraction of the costs of traditional office tools.
- Deliver Business Transformation though custom web and mobile solutions. Cloud-based tools let you quickly and affordably create both mobile and cloud-based front ends for legacy applications or new cloud-native apps that support unique business processes. With these solutions, you can eliminate manual and paper based processes — and the associated delays and data quality issues — and improve efficiency, productivity and employee satisfaction, by giving your workforce tools that make it easier for them to do their job.
- Develop your Business Intelligence with a data warehouse. A new generation of cloud-based data warehouse and data analytics solutions is helping companies break down silos of information and create a single, trusted source of data in weeks rather than years. There’s no need for any upfront capital investment or concern about scalability and security, while a range of self-service tools let users explore the data independently and answer the questions that matter to them.
- Develop your Business Intelligence with new tools like visualisation and AI. Cloud computing lets you take your business intelligence to the next level by offering easy and cost-effective access to sophisticated data analytics. You can easily add location-based and spatial analytics to reveal previously hidden patterns and relationships between assets, people, places and events. Artificial intelligence lets you extract insights from unstructured data like images, video and audio, or predict trends and generate recommendations for customers. And visualisation tools help you present data to users so they can make sense of it more quickly and easily.
If you want to find out more about how to use cloud in the digital workplace, download our Delivering Digital Transformation Success whitepaper or come and talk to the experts in our Digital Transformation team.
Article updated June 2020
First published September 2017