Microsoft Inspire 2019: Why Every Company Needs to Become a Tech Company [Part 2]

In this 5-part series, Synoptek’s leadership team provides insight from the 2019 Microsoft Inspire Conference and how emerging technology influences the future of business.

Unified Communication

Microsoft, never short on vision, captured everyone’s attention when they articulated the future of the modern workplace. One of those key technologies are the digital tools that connect and support employees — from all locations — and boosts productivity, engagement and collaboration.

This perspective makes perfect sense as workplaces are becoming increasingly distributed.  Poorly implemented employee technologies and collaborative processes can cause teams to work in silos rather than with each other.

The risk is that business leaders expect their teams to collaborate to deliver better results due to increasingly competitive markets. Within their respective industries, many of the companies and competitors in the mid-market are on a growth path to become enterprises.

As these companies grow larger and become more geographically distributed, there is a potential clash of different locations, cultures, and working dynamics with cross-functional teams which makes it increasingly difficult to make an impact, reach goals and deliver results.

The unfortunate truth is that we do live in a highly competitive environment. The implication is that there is an urgent need to leverage technology to drive collaboration efficiency — just as good, if not better than an in-person dynamic.

Raising the Bar on the Employee Experience

Concurrently, companies are demanding a universally good user experience no matter which preferences or working environment they have — for example, mobile-first or remote-workers (cloud-first). The ultimate solution requires teams to collaborate on a central unified communications platform like Microsoft Teams.¹

Thanks to technology, workers are becoming increasingly capable of working anywhere and staying connected. During the Inspire conference, Microsoft touted the numbers stating, Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) increases productivity by 36%.

During the Keynote, Microsoft demoed the use of AI–Computer Vision in a very simple mobile app to report on the quality of soap produced during the manufacturing process. The factory line worker takes a random sampled soap bar, takes a picture and the app analyzes the soap bar versus other “machine learned” picture samples classified as “high quality.” The app then automatically uploads the result to an analytics database where executives can view the aggregate production metrics over time on a PowerBI Dashboard served within Teams. MS Teams is Microsoft’s answer to create a singular collaborative platform that combines voice, video, and chat in one and are able to work on a variety of laptop/desktop alternatives like mobile devices and tablets. Additionally, Microsoft is pushing the market borders to enable those 90% of “non-tech” or “low-tech” workers with simple, easy-to-use applications built with complex technologies.

Microsoft not-so-humbly admits, Teams has been at the forefront of this change and is the most accessible technology in Microsoft’s portfolio, centered around Workplace Modernization. It’s also on a rapid adoption trajectory, faster than SharePoint was at its equivalent early life stage, with a little over 500,000 users today. Teams appeals to everyone with its unified communications platform for conversations, files, calls, meetings and apps. It’s a single place to get more work done.

The Benefits of Microsoft Teams Solution? Tenfold.

1. Time Efficient:

• Reduces the total number and duration of meetings
• Information workers save 4 hours per week from improved collaboration and information sharing
• Teams for Firstline Workers saves users 45 minutes per week collaborating with colleagues
• Decision makers improve their time-to-decision by 17.7%
• Less time is spent switching between applications each day
• Employees who work with outside organizations save time by having a shared workspace
• Online resources reduce downtime

2. All-Encompassing:

• Reduces other communication software and hardware solutions

3. Cost Effective:

• By year three, online meetings replace 150 overnight trips
• IT compliance and eDiscovery costs are reduced by 13.2%

4. Increased Retention:

• Improved worker satisfaction, integration, and empowerment reduce attrition rates²

Driving Adoption and Change Management

Because of its breadth, moving an organization to the MS Teams platform is a significantly challenging effort.  All organizations have undergone technology change at some point, but not all companies have been successful driving a change.

Why? Because a successful change is a combination of changing culture, people, process and technology. Microsoft explained one of the three largest opportunities for its partners, like Synoptek, to help business leaders with is change management and adoption of Teams.²

For businesses to boost results and return on investment, it’s critical for them to not only adopt new services, but also to embrace those services and use them as part of their natural rhythm of work. Recent studies show that organizations are six times more likely to meet or exceed business objectives when effective change management is in place.¹

Increased Security Threats

Along with more change also comes more threat to security. As organizations increasingly move applications and data to cloud services, the effectiveness of the network boundary as a security control is diminished.

Today, identity authentication, authorization, and behavioral recognition (ie. your identity can be identified by your regular daily routines in the digital world) become the primary security control. The verification we used to perform only when someone connected to the network must now be monitored continuously by anomalous threat detection technologies, regardless of the user’s location, network, or device.

With more distributed workforces, comes more distributed data and access and an increased risk for data loss, data theft, or unauthorized access to critical infrastructure.  The solution requires customers implement better Cybersecurity and data protection practices around their endpoints and the services (like Teams) they employ.

Microsoft provides several security components to make their environment more productive and secure around identity-based protection, information protection, threat protection, and security management. When organizations implement these security technologies, they take a proactive threat-response strategy and support the productivity needs of their employees and customers.

How Do You Get Started?

At Synoptek, we don’t believe any company should be left behind because they can’t keep up with the pace of technology. We help our customers work through adopting IT so they can continuously improve. The steps are simple:

1. Download Teams today with a to see if it works for your organization.
2. Call Synoptek and schedule a meeting when you’re ready for the next step to drive workforce transformation in your organization.
3. You share your overall objective/strategy — what does success look like for you and your distributed teams?
4. Together, we develop a budget, assessments and scope of service.
5. Move forward with a plan and drive adoption of new technologies.

These changes continue to propel us forward, sometimes faster than we’re ready. In the end, IT leaders have to step back and consider how technology needs to be applied, adopted, and reinforced within their organization to maximize success and ultimately, the productivity of their workforce.

Interested in finding the best solution for increasing the productivity of your workforce? Contact one of our IT experts today.

Stay tuned as Synoptek’s leadership shares their key takeaways from Microsoft’s Inspire 2019 Conference.