Business Info - issue 137

01732 759725 magazine 33 According to The ModernWorkplace , a new report by Ingram Micro and Microsoft, more than one third (38%) of workers in small and medium-sized businesses think their employer isn’t investing enough in technology that could make their business more efficient. As a result, employees are taking things into their own hands and inadvertently putting network and data security at risk; 85% of under 35s admit to using cloud and workplace collaboration tools that aren’t supported by the IT department, including file shares, file hosting, video- conferencing, IM and ‘to do’ boards. It is not just in their choice of technology that businesses are failing to meet the expectations of employees. Ingram Micro’s report shows that employers are not keeping up with demand for flexible working practices either, with 76% of SME workers expressing a desire for flexible working hours and 52% wanting the option to work from home. None of this will come as much of a surprise to Angela Evans, who, as head of the Microsoft 365 business group in the UK, thinks deeply about the modern workplace and how Microsoft software, cloud solutions and Surface devices can help organisations work more effectively, collaboratively and creatively. She says there are three main trends shaping collaboration in the modern workplace: greater diversity, with team members drawn from five generations of workers; greater geographic disparity, with members of the same team often located in different towns or More than just Surface appeal even time-zones; and a multiplication of teams, due to flatter organisational structures, which themselves are a product of the need for faster decision- making. “Not only do you have to work with a different set of people located in a number of places, you’ve got to work with more teams than you did before. Today, people work with twice as many teams as they did five years ago. The big question is how do you break down the boundaries in teamwork and do it in such a way that you engage employees too,” she said. One answer, says Evans, is to migrate to Microsoft 365, which Microsoft introduced in July last year. “Microsoft 365 takes the productivity and collaboration tools of Office 365, the security and device management features of Windows 10, the mobility aspects of our enterprise mobility and security solutions and puts them all together on one platform that enables people to work together in a better way,” she said. Evans argues that with this new platform Microsoft enables organisations to work more creatively, to innovate more quickly, to stay ahead of the competition and to better meet the needs of customers. “We do that in a number of ways,” she said. “AI and machine learning within the Microsoft 365 platform are all the time learning the things you do and the things the people you work with do. It surfaces up recommendations on files you may need to look at; it helps you distinguish focused emails from ones that can wait; and, on the creative side, it offers suggestions to turn an OK PowerPoint presentation into an amazing one. Put in some simple pictures, some bullet points, press a button and it comes back with creative ideas on how to make a presentation more engaging. The other aspect of creativity is inking in the Surface device for those who prefer to write with a pen. “And we do all of that in a mobile world. It doesn’t matter which device you are on – you can move from your phone to your Surface device to a Surface Hub and carry on working as you were. The final pillar of Microsoft 365 is security; we take the approach One year after the launch of Microsoft 365, James Goulding met up with Angela Evans, head of the Microsoft 365 business group in the UK, and Alex Roth, CIO of Landsec, to discuss how the platform can help organisations create a more creative, innovative workplace How do we remove some of the mundane tasks from people and allow them to get their employees to work creatively Continued... SOFTWARE