What Is a Digital Transformation?

A digital transformation refers to the use of technology to dramatically reshape processes and business outcomes. Since the term became part of the enterprise lexicon, it’s generally been misunderstood. A digital transformation isn’t just about implementing new technology; it’s about implementing new technology so that you’ll change the way you do everything at your firm.

The Workplace, Pre-Digital Transformation

Prior to digital transformation, when you walked through the door of a traditional workplace, you’d see some variation on a theme: cubicles, separate offices, closed doors, people hunched over their desks, and basically little or no collaboration taking place. Each department had its own space, maybe even a floor at larger organisations. It was rare to see people work across teams. Information silos reigned.

The Modern Workplace, Post-Digital Transformation

The modern workplace is far different. For a start, you might not walk into an office – the entire operation might be virtual, with distributed teams of remote workers. Second, ‘collaboration’ is no longer a dirty word. In fact, the modern workplace would wither completely without people from different teams or units joining forces.

What you will most likely see is people sharing information easily and quickly thanks to digital communication methods. You’ll see companies meeting goals and experiencing greater success because they’ve unleashed the power of a collaborative workforce. And you’ll see this again and again, across industries and borders.

What’s Powering Digital Transformation and Modern Workplaces?

Without a doubt, digital transformations are powering modern workplaces. Yet, it’s not about implementing technology and hoping that it changes things. The goal of a digital transformation is that technology intentionally changes processes and business outcomes.

Specifically, technology should allow employees to collaborate better, even if they’re located on different continents. It should give them a way to share information digitally, to ensure accuracy and speed. This technology should also be secure so that everyone from members of the C-suite to frontline employees has peace of mind.

Microsoft Modern Workplace Solutions: Facilitating Digital Transformations

Ensuring efficiency, effectiveness, and security has always been top of mind for Microsoft. They’ve developed four solution areas for empowering employees, engaging customers, optimizing operations, and transforming products:

• Modern workplace
• Business applications
• Mobile applications and infrastructure
• Data and AI

Modern Workplace

The modern workplace is a study in contradictions. On one hand, there’s more information out there than ever before, yet it’s harder to make good decisions because you don’t know what data to trust. Also, there are more apps available for employees to boost their productivity, though these apps aren’t secure and lead to damaging data breaches.

To solve those problems, Microsoft has created an integrated technology platform that prioritises collaboration, productivity, insight, and trust. In the next section, we’ll discuss how the business applications included in Modern Workplace facilitate that.

Business Applications

For the modern workplace to deliver on its promises, it needs a set of business applications that allow for collaboration and insight, while keeping information secure. Microsoft’s Modern Workplace offers that with its business applications.

It leverages the Office 365 toolkit for co-authoring, sharing, collaborating, and communicating within Microsoft Office, Teams, Skype for Business, PBX, and conferencing. MyAnalytics and Power BI deliver insight and intelligence across the organisation for data-driven decision making. A number of built-in security features make Microsoft’s Modern Workplace solution a trusted solution.