Along with AI and ML the term Digital Workplace is now used on just about every B2B product you can find. Marketers that have picked up on the trend are guilty of either one of two things:
Marketing BS #1
Dreaming up pie in the sky applications with benefits such as “Transform how your business communicates” (taken from a real website!) and other vague aspirations that supposedly make work feel like a day with the Jetsons.
How you may ask? Well, fork over your credit card now, and we’ll tell you once we found out.
Marketing BS #2
Giving their — effectively unchanged — software the Pimp my ride treatment in a desperate attempt to make a product appear more innovative than it is.
News is now a stream. User profiles are now connections. Documents are called cloud drives. Workflows have become ML Bots. You get the idea…
Cracks are starting to show!
Seemingly unbeknownst to most marketing departments, people are actually pretty good at seeing through this ruse. Gartner is calling this the Hype cycle phenomenon.
Three distinct signs have formed in 2019 that suggest that the “better tomorrow world” is starting to land on the floor of reality throughout 2020.
Sign #1: Digital Workplace Report 2019 (if read between the lines)
For the third time CMSWire have released a report about the current state of digital workplaces collecting responses from no less than 460 companies. (I encourage you to read it.)
And here is a rather interesting excerpt from the report:
First off, I don’t believe for a second that organizations have genuine trouble with their document management. You either have SharePoint or (Drop)box, end of story.
But what it does tell us is this: All of this “AI” stuff isn’t fooling anyone. Companies are not buying that AI is this magical invention that fixes anything from recruiting, marketing, sales to intranets.
In the previous year’s report the “intelligent workplace” was at least a top 6 priority; but this year it wasn’t even on the list.
What are manufacturers doing to address this? Apart from a lot of marketing it seems very little: There is clearly a pent-up need for investment into a new ‘batch’ of workplace productivity software, as even the report goes on to say:
But apart from maybe Slack (which took off right around the same time as the idea of a digital workplace) it seems there is very little novel thinking in the industry.
Sign #2: Lack of success stories
Another sign is that there aren’t that many companies that do Digital Workplaces well. (Or else, you’d have heard about them by now.)
In 2018 you had two promising winners of the best Digital Workplace:
- Liberty Mutual with a, for lack of a better description, sidebar on steroids that aggregates updates from different sources into one convenient view you can also search with chatbots. This product was so successful for Liberty Mutual they promptly spun it off into a startup called Workgrid.
(See a full explanation.) - Cisco with their Cisco Assistant which aggregates all kinds of interactive Cards that can show employees’ PTO allowance, what their next meetings are, etc. onto a customizable Board. (See a full explanation.)
So you may think these rather cool and new approaches should have inspired more companies to follow suit, open up their Intranets to more data, create Cards with interactive elements, etc…
Well you thought wrong. Cus’ here is what won the same award this year:
- American Express with an out-of-the-box version of Jive. To be honest I read the rationale for the award and — sure — it may be a nice all-around Intranet; but I’ve failed to find anything outstanding, never-mind award-worthy about it. But if you find something please leave a comment… (Read the full explanation.)
- Barclays Bank with a rather nicely designed corporate homepage featuring news, some approvals with prominent buttons… all using Cards as a UI element.
Really, it looks awesome…until you discover all of this Lorem ipsum. 🥶
Clearly a very nice mock-up design, but who knows if it’s even out as a beta. (Read the full explanation.)
This feels a little bit like when GM made that really popular electric car in the 90s, showed us all a glimpse of a cleaner, brighter future but then — psych! — realized there’s more money in fossil fuel.
After that car it took us over 10 years (!) for Tesla to release the Model S, proving definitively that they understood the market better than the incumbents.
Looking at the Digital Workplace 2019 winners somehow I feel like that shiny new future of 2018 has been relegated in favour of same old, same old… until a “Tesla of the Digital Workplace” shows up! 💪
Sign #3: Gartner says so themselves!
When in July 2014 Gartner were first mentioning the Digital Workplace in their glossary, they had no idea that just 14 months later they’d already host their first Digital Workplace Summit. You could even say that Gartner has been instrumental in getting the term globally recognized.
So for them to come out and say that Digital Workplaces are maybe not all they’re cracked up to be (for now) is kind of big news. I think it makes it pretty clear that the hype about Digital Workplaces is about to come to a grinding halt next year.
With that, the concept gains just one crucial lifeline: some more time to grow and mature.
But these signs also tell us something else: If I was a marketer for a company selling I̶n̶t̶r̶a̶n̶e̶t̶s, erm I mean, Digital Workplaces all the above should give me pause: Is what I’m selling actually addressing companies’ needs on a profound and holistic level? Or do we just plaster a bunch of Yoga-babbel headlines on our website?
