There has been an increasing amount of interest in the evolution of intranets into digital workplaces. Towards the end of 2011 Infocentric Research and NetStrategy/JMC published reports that set out possible frameworks for digital workplaces. The Digital Workplace Forum has been launched by the Intranet Benchmarking Forum and Paul Miller’s book on digital workplaces is due out next month. Mark Morrell has also been a proponent of digital workplaces. All these provide vision, but so far comparatively little attention has been paid to issues which might affect the rate of development of digital workplaces.
The rapid development of cloud and mobile technologies, especially tablet adoption by managers, is likely to stimulate interest in digital workplaces over the next couple of years. Our concern is that the vision is not fulfilled because of a lack of early attention to some of the underlying technology, information and governance issues.
Our latest Research Note 02/2012 sets out twenty of these issues. These should not be seen as ‘barriers’, just issues that need to be identified, assessed and actioned so that the speed of digital workplace development is accelerated. Some of these may not be relevant to every company, and the implications of others may be fully understood. However it could be that just one or two of these issues make all the difference to the attainment of the vision.
Martin White