Empowering employees one desktop at a time

Gartner released its magic quadrant for managed workplace services. We are very pleased to see that Atos is recognized as a leader and keeps progressing year over year, both in Europe and North America for over 3 years in a row.

The speed of change in digital workplace is stunning! Only a few years ago, solutioning a workplace deal meant sizing how many people would answer the phone. It was about imaging PC and packaging user applications in a "one-size-fits-all” approach.

But things have changed

In the past few years, organizations have begun to realize the importance of employee engagement which means that as a service provider, we are now committed to helping our clients deliver the services that empower their employees.

Solutioning a workplace deal today means defining how to transform the employee experience. It starts with understanding who these employees are, what their needs are, what their journeys within their IT environment are, how we can have an impact on these journeys, and also how we are going to monitor this impact.

From personas to XLAs

Let's look at Diana. She works for a consulting company and must hire new consultants every month. Her priority is to onboard them on a customer project as quickly as possible. It means making devices available to them on day 1, with accounts properly created in all applications, but also joining a team and taking in the knowledge that is available there.

Or Eliana, she works in a hospital as a nursing manager in the intensive care unit. She has a lot of administrative tasks and wants to have time to focus on her patients as well. We want to allow her to do everything she needs from a mobile phone, from filling forms to contact a colleague.

What about Carolina, she works in retail as a store manager. She supervises a team of salespeople. They all rely on tablets to conclude sales and any unavailability means lost business. We need to avoid any disruption and deliver support at their fingertips.

In the end, core pieces of the solution may be the same: we will need to manage and secure different devices, deliver omnichannel support, likely including some chatbot, some proactive analytics to avoid incidents, some collaboration tools to interact, some automation capabilities to empower the user… even though the focus will differ. What we measure will always be aligned to the business requirements. And more than anything, where we will commit as a service provider (through Experience Level Agreements or XLAs) will differ.

This is the journey we are on with our clients. And we believe that this is the commitment that Gartner recognizes and rewards in their magic quadrant.

It's also about delivery

Yet vision alone doesn’t make leaders. Beyond the vision, we work relentlessly to transform our workplace delivery. Again, a few years ago, it was all about people answering the phone or managing SCCM and Exchange platforms. As I mentioned in a previous blog, now it’s all about new tools powered by AI, about new skills, about a new mindset. Transforming services for over 3 million end-users doesn’t happen overnight, and it is through a systematic approach with and for all our clients that we are progressing, slowly but surely!

This is just the beginning

In the words of Justin Trudeau: "The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again"; this is just the beginning of workplace transformation. In front of us lies the future of work: the citizen developer is here and we need to support him, we need to help every employee to channel their energy toward a higher purpose, we need to get him ready for switching jobs thanks to continuous learning and easy access to knowledge.

Thank you to all our clients who are embracing the journey toward new ways of working, trusting our experience to deliver, while inspiring us to deliver more innovations.