CIOs everywhere want to create a more digital workplace — one that reinforces that IT is a strategic business partner, a function that creates opportunity for the business. And one that streamlines the IT environment, reducing complexity and improving the experience for end users. While digital transformation involves all areas of the business, one of the most impactful places to focus on is your enterprise app strategy.
Now, rethinking an app strategy doesn’t just mean moving away from legacy systems and implementing new SaaS solutions. It truly means taking a hard look at your employees and what they do on a day-to-day basis to determine what would make them most successful. Here, we’ve identified five tips to create an enterprise app strategy that will help your employees work smarter and more efficiently:
- Assess how employees get their best, most productive work done
A successful enterprise application strategy is developed with inputs from across the organization. In other words, it’s important to consider where and how your employees spend their time. Think about all of the channels, such as devices, apps, and tools employees use to do their jobs. Enterprise apps and data should be accessible from all of the different channels your employees use in order to simplify how they access information and to drive work productivity and engagement, and ultimately their employee experience.
- Think micro to boost employee engagement
App development and deployment has been moving to micro for quite some time. Rather than focusing on bloated app development projects that are slow to complete, IT should focus on delivering simpler solutions to complex problems. Why? Because employees get distracted by (and simply delay completing) complicated workflows that seem to have no end or require constant context switching. Instead, employees want the most urgent part of their workflow delivered to them so they can get it done quickly.
Then, they want to receive a notification for the next portion of the project that needs completion. This helps them focus on smaller, more manageable chunks of work, which can be completed quickly. The result: greater employee engagement and productivity.
- Personalize everything to drive user adoption
Too often, employees are presented with far too much data to make a rational decision. Instead, employees would prefer to access only a subset of data that has been personalized to their specific needs. Think about the apps you use in your personal life. LinkedIn and Twitter, for example, personalize and deliver content based on your preferences and search history.
You receive push notifications for things that need immediate attention (or are perceived as very important) and then you have the option to check your customized feed during downtime to see what you missed. Enterprise apps should take the same approach to create an engaging experience that drives adoption and productivity.
- Use machine learning and artificial intelligence
Employees spend more than 15 percent of their time searching for information across different tools to perform important tasks. This is no longer acceptable. Machine learning and artificial intelligence can make it much easier for employees to find enterprise information. Machine learning can overcome the roadblocks that keep employees from getting the information they need to do their jobs, such as information siloes and unstructured data, by providing employees the exact data they need when they need it.
It can monitor past information needs to surface what’s important to the individual worker, or it can go even further and monitor for important changes in your business systems and surface personalized updates before employees even know they need them. While these digital workspace technologies are still emerging, many companies are exploring them to simplify how their teams work.
- Start small to transform employee experience
Rolling out new systems and applications to transform the way your company works will be a daunting task. So start small with high-value use cases. Prioritize the apps and the workflows that will have an immediate impact on your employees and the business. Then, as you see results, you can focus on expanding the use cases — and thus the number and types of apps — that will benefit from a new way of doing things.
While there are many components of an enterprise app strategy that can work for your business, our hope is that these steps will help you create one that drives work productivity, employee engagement, and a better employee experience.
Check out this short video that shows how Citrix Workspace consolidates everything employees need into one secure environment — while also delivering an intuitive, guided employee experience.
