Digital workplace and enterprise architecture -- two sides to same coin

You may have heard of the emerging concept of the "Digital Workplace:" where employees go to get work done digitally. Much of the current discussion has centered around what notions of a digital workplace mean for traditional intranets, emerging social collaboration spaces, and aging transactional systems.

Those are important topics, but I think an even bigger to-do for enterprises is to bring the right skill sets to bear. One key skill set to engage here is enterprise architecture.

If you examine the individual applications and platforms that employees access to complete work every day, you end up charting myriad of different systems in the typical enterprise. Some of these may be loosely aggregated within a portal, while others may not. The digital workplace concept, though, helpfully turns the table around by looking at it from the standpoint of the employee, rather than the enterprise. There's clearly an opportunity to apply well-known user experience methodologies -- such as User Centered Design (UCD) -- to improve your colleagues' effectiveness here.

But as you dig deeper into the employee digital experience, you'll discover more than just clunky, freestanding applications. You'll find:

Cataloging and understanding the business value of all these systems is the job of an enterprise architect. If you are trying to transform your digital workplace, then you'd do well to engage your enterprise architecture team -- you have one, right? -- in reconstructing the pieces into a greater whole.

Just remember that the point is not to re-arrange boxes and arrows to work your way forward from back-end systems to employees, but rather to re-arrange what happens on your colleagues' screens by working your way backwards. Is it too simple to say, UCD + EA = New Digital Workplace ?

Excerpt from the TeamPage Evaluation

Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software Evaluation Stream looks at... Architecture of Traction TeamPage

"TeamPage is kind of like a web application in a box, although part of the box is exposed to tweaking and development. It is a Java-based application that runs in its own unique container with its own embedded, file system-based repository. This means that it comes with everything you need to run the product, on top of almost any operating system, but it also means that you are committing to a one-off platform that will not really leverage many of your other IT investments. It's worth digging a little deeper here...."
(p. 316)

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