26 Nov A day in the life of a modern workplace Consultant

Wiebe van der Wildt, senior O365 consultant at Sirus, shares his thoughts on the changing landscape of the evolving modern workplace. More relevant than ever: never before have companies had to show this level of flexibility towards combining home & office environment.

The ultime ICT consultant’s goal …

Thanks to current technology and possibilities, business is closer involved in ICT processes than ever before, which offers opportunities to cooperate more efficiently and in a transparent way to achieve organizational goals and maximize the return on investment. Concepts such as digital workplace, anytime, anywhere, any device, self-service IT and security are more than ever everyday topics for discussion. Consequently, the demand for controllability is greatly increased as well.

The goal for an ICT consultant is always a successful implementation. That’s why it’s important to provide ICT governance guidelines and giving delineated direction, which ensures manageability and control over the digital environment as secure as possible and in an organized manner. Processes, roles, responsibilities and accountability should be well defined in the first place, as well as the presence of sufficient knowledge, thoughtful information management design and a future minded plan, based on a clear vision.

As we all know, things are changing really fast. So … since a while, Office 365 seems to be part of Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365 is a complete solution, including Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security, that should empower everyone to be creative and work together in a secure way.

Cloud service model

This whole cloud service model also means shared responsibility. Microsoft as the cloud service provider in this case, has multiple important roles and responsibilities as well, which therefore influences the overall platform management and logically requires a different approach from the customer. I have to admit that Microsoft aims to provide the best possible support to accomplish organizational goals with a view to digital transformation and controllability of the digital workplace, by offering their cloud services as complete as possible.

However, cloud services still do require additional attention in different ways. M365 is updating on an almost daily basis. This means new features and sometimes entire new services are frequently added to the platform. Upcoming changes can be monitored in advance, by following the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. If required, most features and services can be disabled as well. And despite the wide variety of available services and applications available in the platform, it is recommended to pick the right toolset (and therefore disable what isn’t used), tailored to the end users and culture in an organization. This doesn’t mean that this cannot change in the future, but it’s important to have a clear structure in place to start with. So, do keep in mind that:

“It is not because you can, that you should … “

Wiebe van der Wildt