Special report: How to optimize the smart office (free PDF)

Today’s offices are using technology to improve collaboration, boost productivity, save energy, and safeguard employee health. This ebook, based on the latest ZDNet/TechRepublic special feature, explores the various ways companies are taking advantage of the innovations.

From the ebook:

IT leaders can use connected technologies and services to create agile workspaces. These smart offices represent the future of the corporate environment, but what do such developments mean for the roles and responsibilities of CIOs? Five experts give their views and suggest where IT leaders should focus their attention.

Concentrate on making people productive
J. P. Gownder, principal analyst at Forrester, says the smart office represents a new opportunity for employees and the IT leaders who manage collaboration. He says CIOs have spent a great deal of time and energy during the past decade ensuring staff can work from anywhere.

“CIOs have succeeded in helping employees be more successful while on the road, at client sites, or even at home,” he says. “Yet they’ve spent relatively less time optimising working conditions within the office, relying upon sub-optimal technologies like traditional videoconferencing and audioconferencing, and non-digital whiteboards.”

Gownder says the good news is developments associated to the smart office will change this dynamic, allowing for better collaboration inside offices. As a result, just as CIOs have helped workers become far more productive on the move over the past decade, in the next ten years, they will focus on making teams of people more productive.

“Using technologies such as large-format touchscreens, like Microsoft Surface Hub or Prysm, voice-controlled intelligent agents, like Amazon Alexa for Business, virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, like Microsoft HoloLens or HTC Vive Pro, and an increasing number of artificially intelligent software tools, we will equip individuals and teams to work better together, with help from intelligent machines,” says Gownder.

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Topic:
Innovation
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PDF