The rising cost of energy, real estate, and office space, coupled with growing pressure to implement sustainable and environment friendly workspaces in order to attract and retain the next generation of workers, is driving organisations to rethink the roles of their employees within the organisation, how they collaborate, and their relationships to applications and devices. This trend is ushering in a massive transition in the workplace that’s aimed at raising the productivity of employees.

In a move to help organisations harness today’s workplace patterns and culture and stay ahead of the changes in workforce dynamics, while reducing energy and real estate costs, Dimension Data today announced the launch of its workspaces for tomorrow strategy.

Nadeem Ahmad, Dimension Data’s Global Technology Director says, “During the course of any day, people complete many different work activities. Some require high levels of concentration; others more collaboration. Workspaces for tomorrow is a workplace strategy that captures these varied work styles, and empowers individuals with the freedom to choose different types of work settings to suit their various work activities.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flexible workspaces and technologies

Ahmad says the goal is to provide modern, collaborative environment with innovative workspaces, as well as the technology to support a flexible workstyle. “Workspaces for tomorrow refocuses the organisation’s employees on the activities they need to do to achieve goals in a more productive, collaborative, flexible, and open manner. At its heart is organisation-wide collaboration and team enablement,” explains Ahmad and points out that mobility and cloud, which are driving the strategy around workspaces for tomorrow, are impacting the patterns and culture of the workplace today in terms of flexibility of work arrangements and the workforce. In other words, where and how employees do their work.

In terms of mobility, mobile devices are overtaking PCs. There’s also the digitisation of work processes as well as the proliferation of mobile apps and these are being used to accomplish tasks and activities whilst away from the office, even within the office but away from the desk.

In terms of cloud, there’s a shift to user centric computing, which is all about the fast, secure delivery of application services and data to any end-point at any location. As a part of that the location of the service is transparent to the end-user.

“As an end-user myself, I’m concerned with getting the service or my data on my device easily. I don’t care where the service comes from, or where my data is stored when I’m not using it. As long as it’s available to me – regardless of my device or location – it’s a new service consumptive model,” says Ahmad.

Total mobility, not just devices

Workspaces for tomorrow focuses on providing improvements across the people, environment, and technology in the workplace. It offers employees the choice of where and how they work by investing in modern collaborative office spaces and also the technology that enables employees to work in their office, elsewhere on campus or remotely.

Dimension Data provides guidance and leadership by following a holistic approach that embraces physical spaces, culture and people, technology, and business processes. We establish partnerships with office design consulting firms or real estate-related firms, such as well-established architects and interior design companies. We lead with mobility, but we understand it’s not just about smartphones and tablets.

At the foundation of workspaces for tomorrow is Dimension Data’s End-user Computing (EUC) platform which enables client projects rapidly because it helps deal with any variables when implementing the overall solution. In conjunction with the EUC platform, Dimension Data delivers other relevant networking, security and communications solutions required by clients for their specific implementation to create an overall solution architecture.

“It’s all about putting users at the centre and allowing access to applications and data from any device and any location. This is in turn will deliver better utilisation of the work environment, lower real estate costs, and ultimately cut energy costs,” says Ahmad.