The most impactful data insights that help leaders make better technology investments come directly from the employees: Ivan Dopplé

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Ivan Dopplé, Global Practice Leader, Digital Workplace, Kyndryl

1. What are the key elements of a digital workplace strategy and how can enterprises ensure a smooth transition to a hybrid ecosystem?

Hybrid and remote working are becoming the future for many enterprises, but it demands a smooth IT strategy that can support their workforce. An effective digital workplace strategy must consider:

• Simplifying legacy processes and environments
• Enhance user experience for employees and customers
• Reducing security risks and the overall cost of technology operations

For a successful execution of the strategy, it needs a top-down approach starting from the organization’s C-Suite, where executives must align hybrid workplace aspirations with broader business objectives. Most CIOs and transformation leaders can’t and won’t see improvements in workforce collaboration and innovation in a hybrid work setting if they’re still struggling to understand what types of data, insights and technology will effectively produce transformative benefits in current times. Investment in digital and work transformation technologies must align with organizational imperatives around improved business resilience and increased employee productivity.

Managed support services driven by analytics help to ensure an improved user experience. Each touchpoint — including procurement, devices, applications, management, and support — must be integrated into a seamless and secure system. Agile workplace services, designed to enable access across devices and platforms from virtually any location, can deliver cloud-based desktops and social collaboration tools in a fully managed suite of tools for continuous improvement. By enabling the digital workforce and enhancing the employee user experience, organizations can create an intelligent support infrastructure that’s continuously learning with each interaction by using analytics, cognitive and automation technology.

2. How can organizations ensure a cyber-resilient workspace with a digitally disruptive business model?

Organizations across the globe are increasingly moving from a vulnerability-focused defense strategy to an intelligence-driven framework. The right technology, combined with a highly responsive support system and a strong cybersecurity plan, can help employees work more efficiently and effectively wherever they’re located. While a reactive approach can limit the ability to predict future threats, newer, analyst-based security methodologies incorporated with broader risk management approaches can help to develop threat profiles to guide decision-making and customize prevention strategies for key assets. By analyzing the capabilities, objectives, and limitations of cyber attackers, organizations with a digital centric business model can:

• Predict areas of weakness before they can be exploited
• Leverage data to understand the tactics and techniques of bad actors
• Prioritize investments to address specific cybersecurity limitations
• Reduce their attack surface and lower overall risk to the business

3. What role does employee sentiment data and their digital experiences play in business outcomes?

A meaningful employee engagement strategy requires a differentiated, personalized approach to measuring and tracking employee-centric data in remote and hybrid workplace environments. The most impactful data insights that help leaders make better technology investments come directly from the employees. According to a survey of C-suite decision makers conducted by global market research firm Forrester on behalf of Kyndryl, improving the employee experience is a top priority for 53% of executives. Investing in services like digital workplace consulting or digital experience management can help unleash a whole lot of productivity and compassion from employees that then translates to customers and their experience.

Data-rich organizations with poor systems of insight are the byproduct of siloed technology ecosystems with weak integration points between cloud environments. Hence, limited insights not only prevent organizations from improving customer experience – they also inhibit advancements in employee experience.

Strategies to enhance IT support and streamline the delivery of modern workspaces through desktop virtualization services can help foster a more seamless experience for employees that ultimately creates a positive ROI. These outcomes are measured by improved customer retention, employee productivity, revenue growth, agility, and improved customer satisfaction scores.

4. How do Kyndryl’s digital workspace services address the challenges of data complexities for its IT partners and customers?

Organizations struggle with data, insights, and technology to improve experiences that yield transformative benefits. Employees are 230% more engaged and 85% more likely to stay in a job beyond three years if they have the right technological support, yet IT support is a key challenge for a modern hybrid workplace, according to IDC, with 42% of organizational leaders reporting a lack of IT support is the biggest IT challenge to supporting remote/hybrid workers today.

Kyndryl’s Digital Workplace solutions are designed for proactive and predictive issue avoidance using cognitive automation, data analytics, and self-healing technologies. These services place the user at the center of everything our team does to help our customers drive closer alignments to business outcomes and employee experiences, as this has a downstream impact on the overall customer experience (CX) for our clients and the customers they serve. Everything Kyndryl does across the enterprise is data-driven, with prescriptive analytics guiding what the end-user experience needs to be and facilitated through its cognitive channels. Our focus is on the integration of analytics, cognitive, and automation into all digital workplace offerings.