Digital Workplace: Hype or Reality?

The digital workplace is not an intranet on steroids, or a replacement of an intranet; or the next great enterprise portal, nor is it SharePoint. The digital workplace describes a work place of digitally interconnected tools used to get work done. It’s that simple. And yet, that complex.

Digital Workplace Definition

Many will claim to be the first to use or define the “digital workplace” (what is it about words that have been in existence for dozens of years that when combined in a certain combination have consultants clamoring to be the inventor?); the reality is that it’s been present at all of our respective work places since the first browsers appeared on company PC’s in the 1990s. I first heard the phrase when IBM referred to their internal, online environment as the digital workplace around 2002.

Now don’t be distracted by some of the vendors out there; there are some horrific consultant-speak definitions of the digital workplace that are, in fact, not a definition at all but rather a jumble of new age terms used to sell naive IT and communications managers. One dreadful consultant definition actually says the digital workplace is an ‘approach’ to “a consumer-like computing environment that is better able to facilitate innovative and flexible working…”

Read the full column: Digital Workplace or Intranet?