Boosting Your Competitiveness Through Workplace Modernization

Common mistakes made during modernization

The events of 2020 forced businesses across all industries to quickly adapt to a new reality where remote work is the norm. Because of this, many enterprises needed to speed up—or start from scratch—workplace modernization initiatives.

As a result of this accelerated need, it has been common for organizations to encounter roadblocks—excessive spending, hurdles in adopting new technology—that disrupted their operations.

These roadblocks were likely caused by three common errors businesses make as they modernize:

1. A failure to understand workloads

When modernizing infrastructure, it’s often tempting for companies to hone in on things like specific configurations and storage needs.

These, while important steps to focus on eventually, are not where your initial focus should be. Instead, you need to kick off your modernization process by taking a holistic assessment of where your infrastructure currently stands.

This assessment needs to answer questions like:

• What exactly are your company’s needs?
• What is already working and what can be improved?
• What are you trying to achieve through modernization—not just in the short term but in the future?

Without answers to these questions, your organization will start out on the wrong footing—not understanding your workloads and the effectiveness of the tools you’re already using.

2. Trying to do too much at once

It’s critical to remember that workplace modernization is a marathon and not a sprint.

Companies that focus on making big leaps with technology instead of incremental and iterative improvements often find themselves overwhelmed by the modernization process.

Put another way, if you want to adopt advanced technology like remote virtual desktops, you need to build out the right IT infrastructure to handle them first.

Why? Because new tools and workflows take time to master. Technologies need to be tested before deployment, employees must be properly trained, and buy-in needs to be achieved across the board.

Rather than trying to adopt new technologies en masse, you should instead pay particular attention to what you’re realistically trying to achieve with modernization.

Your goal shouldn’t be to change overnight but, rather, to marry what already works for your organization with what will work in the future as you continue to grow and scale.

In other words, you want to focus on having the right infrastructure in place to leverage advances in technology—without abandoning what is effective.

3. Going the DIY route

Organizations that believe they have the right tools and experience in-house to modernize often learn that taking a DIY approach is far more complicated—and expensive—than they anticipated.

Many enterprises don’t have teams with the specialized skills in-house to implement modernization throughout the organization. And even those enterprises with robust IT teams can easily find the lift of the workforce modernization quickly becomes much bigger than they expected.

Simple mistakes can often snowball into costly errors, and while DIY solutions may seem cheaper at first, plunging into workplace modernization without proper knowledge and expertise has a high possibility of costing far more than partnering with professionals.

How do you find the right modernization partner? That depends on your level of needs. Ask yourself:

• How much of the modernization process will you be asking partners to manage?
• Are you looking for an ongoing relationship, such as system operations and maintenance?
• Will you need an array of potential solutions or are you looking for a single recommendation?

Since your organization will benefit from a partner that is both technically capable and able to understand and translate business objectives, knowing the answers to these questions will make it easier for potential partners to have a full picture of your needs.

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