Workplace what?

A long time ago at a JAMF course not that far away…

Lets get the obvious question out of the way; what is Workplace Technology? Well, to explain that I’ll have to take you back to a JAMF training course I was on in London in around 2015. I got into a conversation with another student over lunch who had just been promoted at their company but wasn’t sure what they wanted their new title to be. ‘IT Manager’ didn’t make sense to him because IT was far too broad a term to accurately describe what he was doing, and after thinking it over I agreed. The role of an ‘IT’ manager and the scope of their team had radically changed from the preceding years, and continued to do so.

For some context, my first IT Management role was purely to look after the desktops, laptops, printers, and a couple of email and file servers in a cupboard, and at the time that was all anyone considered ‘IT’.

This role however covered Identity Access Management to ensure staff had access to tens if not hundreds of different systems many of which were critical to the business continuing to operate, vendor management for 100+ SaaS products costing millions and storing essential and often highly confidential data, automation between those SaaS products via API to automate common tasks and save staff thousands of hours a year, and overall just a hugely broadened scope that touched almost every system anyone would use at the business on a day-to-day basis. The stakes of this role had suddenly got much higher.

Over the next day or two we put our heads together to come up with a more succinct name for whatever it was that manging this ever-expanding collection of technologies should be titled. Obviously ‘Technology’ was front and centre and could definitely stay, but ‘Information’ had lost all meaning. As much as I’d love to say it was me, neither of us remember who was the first of us to say ‘Workplace Technology’ so we’ll take shared credit, but it immediately clicked and that was it. We look after the technology used in the workplace. In hindsight we couldn’t have come up with a better name.

Workplace Technology Awakens

The student I mentioned earlier was Sachin Parmar who is now the Head of Workplace Technology at Just Eat. And as for me, if you hadn’t guessed from the URL, I’m Joe Steele the Director of Workplace Technology at Railsr (formerly Railsbank). Mine and Sachin’s paths haven’t really crossed since that training course, although I’ve been keeping up with his various talks and blog posts over the years. That was until I had the idea to start this blog and reached out to him to check I was regaling the story accurately.

What I found extremely interesting is despite our lack of interactions our job role and teams had progressed very similarly. One of the first things I did when I joined Railsr was split the team into Support and Engineering roles to create clearer purpose for the teams. Support supported what we had, and Engineering engineered what we wanted to have. I also rolled out an IAM solution, a new Mobile Device Management solution, reimagined our tech vendor management approach, and took ownership of technology used in the workplace as a whole so as to create a more seamless experience for our end-users. And Sachin tells me a similar story for his approach to the point where we now own all technical services outside of core platform at our respective businesses.

COVID Strikes Back

The years since that initial encounter have seen unprecedented change in the world of technology, largely down to the effects of COVID. In the blink of an eye the working world became fully-remote (and in many cases remains so). Suddenly the quality of the Workplace Technology team at a business was the difference between being able to operate or not throughout lockdowns and social distancing. Overnight every IT system needed to be accessible remotely and companies were forced to move to cloud-based systems. Technology spend immediately skyrocketed in these areas as companies became more and more reliant on cloud-based systems. And this is without even mentioning the advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality, and quantum computing happening throughout.

A New Scope

What does this mean for Workplace Tech? Well it means we’re now responsible for processes that touch every part of the business. I’ll give you an example of some of the steps in common Workplace Technology onboarding workflows.

1. HR add a new staff member on to their cloud-based HR system
2. Workplace Tech’s Identity and Access Management system syncs the new user, along with details such as their job title, team, office-location, and email address and creates the user’s identity
3. Automations stemming from the IAM system, driven by information gathered from HR, do the following:
   • Create the user’s account on the building access control system, give them access to their assigned office, and prompt facilities to ready an ID card
   • Create the user on finance’s payroll system complete with all required information taken from the HR system
   • Give the user access to their team’s folder on the file sharing platform
   • Give the user access to all relevant SaaS / software systems according to their title and team. Marketing staff get marketing-related apps, engineers get relevant platform access etc
   • Their manager gets reminders via chat apps and email to perform onboarding tasks, as well as calendar events created automatically for initial onboarding sessions
   • An email is sent to a hardware procurement partner to provide and ship a laptop to the relevant office of the new starter
   • Relevant training material is sent out automatically for onboarding
   • The new starter is automatically activated on their start day and ready to go

By implementing this workflow Workplace Technology Engineering has created a zero-touch process to orchestrate the entire technology, payroll, facilities, and [insert new starter’s team here] onboarding process for a new member of staff in an instant. From Facilities to Engineering, HR to Sales, Marketing to Finance, Workplace Tech now have a profound effect on the day-to-day operations of every part of the business. Never before have WPT/IT teams had such an influence on the success of a business.

The Rise of Workplace Technology

In the years between coining the phrase and today I’ve seen ever increasing Workplace Tech and Workplace IT roles appear, initially at fintechs, but now across all verticals. I get approached on LinkedIn every other day about these roles, and just over a month ago I got a particularly interesting message that sparked the idea for the blog. An IT Director of a large UK high-street store asked for a call with me to discuss the ‘principals of Workplace Technology’ and ‘how they might implement them’ at their business. At this point I realised I’d never put anything to paper about what WPT principals might even be, they just lived in my head. Over the coming months and perhaps years I hope to commit the principals and strategies I, and others, have used to help deliver success in Enterprise through Workplace Technology.

The End, or?

So again, what is Workplace Technology? It’s the ever-changing array of technologies we use in our workplace, wherever and whatever that might be, to best achieve the outcomes we need to achieve in our jobs. And our jobs as a Workplace Technology team? To implement, automate, and integrate these technologies in such a way to ensure efficiency, security, and an overall exemplary technology experience to all of our teams no matter what outcome they’re trying to achieve.

This is in fact just the start of the content I hope to create around Workplace Technology. I’ll be writing blog posts whenever I have anything interesting to say, conducting the occasional interview (perhaps even in a podcast) with my peers and other influential people in the industry, and maybe put some videos and tutorials out in the future. I’ll be discussing MDM, SaaS, IAM, macOS, Windows, automation tools, WPT strategy and much more. In my next post I’ll talk about my journey from IT 1st line to Workplace Tech Director and perhaps then you can decide whether I’m worth listening to!

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