Creating the Ideal Digital Workplace Blueprint

Digital Workplace is now the de-facto industry term to capture the importance of employee experience to organisations and how technology is a critical enabler. At Dimension Data, our practice consults with our clients on workplace strategy, technology solutions and we provide workplace integration and operate services. Last year, we began our own Digital Workplace transformation with the relocation of our Sydney office and subsequent Melbourne and Brisbane office moves. This program of work gave us the blank sheet of paper we needed to design the ideal digital workplace environment for our employees, clients and partners. It also put our go-to-market strategy to the test and the learnings from this program are now embedded into our practice moving forward.

This is a series of posts on how to connect users and technology to physical spaces and building systems to optimise the workplace experience leveraging the real-life experience of our own Digital Workplace program.

Part 1: Modern Collaboration

Over almost two decades, Dimension Data had created a unique and special space in the Bushell’s Building in Sydney’s historic The Rocks precinct. However, the heritage restrictions of the space were limiting our ability to transform into an Agile working environment and achieve our vision for a digital workplace.

We couldn’t optimise our use of expensive Sydney CBD office space, there was no flow between floors and we had a inconsistent experience across each of our meeting rooms and breakout areas.

With our lease up for renewal last year, we took the opportunity to relocate to a new office over four floors in the Darling Park tower. Our vision for the new space was to provide an fantastic experience that makes people really want to come to work in our new office, and to optimise our ability to collaborate and therefore deliver an incredible outcome for our clients.

One of the core tenets of that vision was the concept of modern collaboration. We needed to create borderless collaboration, which means thinking about the employee experience beyond the physical walls of the office. We do this in the services we deliver to our clients, where teams need to securely collaborate internally and externally, and communicate across different locations and time zones, and users need to be able to join and host meetings, switch between voice, video, web and content sharing, in person and online, easily and without the help of IT. Modern collaboration captures this great end user experience, business productivity and frictionless communications. There are no wires in our meeting rooms.

Fundamental to this collaboration is what it means to be a “connected employee”. The one device we invariably always have with us is our smartphone, so the best way to start this process via a companion app. We’ve created a smart spaces platform that connects our wired and wireless network infrastructure with building management systems and spaces in a way that takes advantage of the smartphone’s capabilities to make things seamless to the end user. Meeting rooms, hot desks, smart lockers, printers and collaborative spaces can all be connected to the user, and we can easily integrate emerging technologies now and in the future to constantly improve the user experience. We can provide way-finding services via the app to direct an employee to their allocated car parking spot or hot desk for the day, or to find one of their colleagues in the office.

We are seeing an increasing trend to more work being done in code to drive innovation in business, Dimension Data included. Globally, we’ve adopted an open source development technique called Inner sourcing, which encourages collaboration across teams. We’ve taken that one step further in our new Sydney office by extending the workplace to include external parties – our vendors, collaboration partners and clients.

It’s just as easy for guests on our network to share content and collaborate in our meeting rooms as it is for our own employees. Our Client Innovation Centre (CIC), located in the heart of the building, is accessible to all visitors and is in constant use. We’ve also built an open API platform for the testing and development of new applications and use cases, for hackathons, and innovation weeks.

The transformation in the workplace experience for our own people, our clients and our partners from our move to Darling Park has been profound. We are able to promote more agility, more innovative thinking and more meaningful employee engagement as a result of our Digital Workplace investment.

In Part 2, I'll talk more about modern approaches to securing the workplace technology environment.

I'm always interested to hear about other workplace transformation initiatives and the impact of technology.