siliconindia | | September 20189Considering the path-breaking General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the onus is on organizations to provide a completely secure experienceintuitive, comprehensive and ac-cessible on-the-go on a device of their choice. Meeting this challenge will sepa-rate good workplaces of today from the great workplaces of tomorrow. The first movers would have the in-evitable advantage of being able to attract talent on the strength of pro-viding an accelerated digital experi-ence for the employees.Making it Mean Something!What do we mean by `digital experi-ence'? Think of how today's employ-ees join the workforce; there's typi-cally 100 different emails sent out, with tons of reminders, follow-ups, clarifications, and a lot of handhold-ing before the employee finally sub-mits the required details to make sure things are in place for Day-1, which comes with its own share of muddles.From Day-1 to Day-N, an employ-ee wants and needs to communicate, collaborate and access a plethora of information. Any solution envisioned for the modern employee will need to encompass elements of payroll, trav-el, expenses and much more, from a services standpoint, giftwrapped into one access point. Indeed, the solution would be a virtual representation of all departments/services that an em-ployee would want to access.The employee is also a `so-cial' animal. Giants like Facebook, Microsoft, and Slack have all worked over the years to weave the fabric of online social interaction into the modern work routine with varying degrees of success. However, the key issue still prevailing is that these options remain discrete and are al-ways in a danger of cluttering-up the employee's device with the dreaded `one more application'. The Road to the FutureThe journey for any organization will be full of challenges and learn-ings, some inevitable, some surpris-ing. For example; take the ques-tion of how one would decide on the solution ­ · Would it go for an off-the-shelf product with an established reputa-tion in the market or build something from scratch?· Should it build many apps for many functionalities or build one app for everything? Next is the conceptualization of the app, its feature set, and its tech-nical aspects. There are three key perspectives that every organization needs to take into consideration in terms of employees' expectations in terms of `Information', `Functional-ity' and `Collaboration':· Transactions an employee is likely to perform during a day· Information the organization might want or need to communicate to employee· Interactions employees would want to have with one-anotherThis translates into a full feature set, many of which are addressed by specialized but pocket apps in the market today. This finally needs to be reviewed from an information secu-rity standpoint, for in the age of in-formation, security was, is, and will be of paramount importance. Care must be taken to adhere to the legal and cultural sensitivities of a work-force that spans across multiple con-tinents, with the choice to disclose sensitive information residing with the users of the app. Considering the path-breaking General Data Protec-tion Regulation (GDPR), the onus is on organizations to provide a com-pletely secure experience.While the most convenient solu-tion will undoubtedly be an app, in many cases, one could also make a compelling case for an app+web solution. This provides a more com-plete solution, while also enabling it to gather more data on user patterns and behavior, readying it for the leap into artificial intelligence. Indeed, the day is not far ahead when AI as-sistants change the dynamics of func-tioning at the workplace. Sujitesh Das
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