Happy birthday, Steve Jobs: Imagining innovator's ideal digital workplace

Today, we celebrate the 63^rd birthday of Steve Jobs, one of the greatest innovators of our times. To think of Jobs without thinking of the iPhone is impossible. With the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, he changed a lot in the technology space. The entire communication landscape was completely redefined. The way people communicated and collaborated changed first with cameras, touch keyboard and then with the advent of apps store. And, while over the decade, the iPhones have become more equipped and powerful devices, these devices still stand for transforming communication and collaboration. Bringing someone’s entire world to them, intuitively and conveniently wasn’t done this way before.

 
Jobs was a visionary, his vision was for technology and devices to act as enablers. In his world, technology and devices had to serve the user, and not the other way around. He wanted devices to be advanced but so simple to use that they could become part of everyone’s lives. He always challenged the status quo. When the iPhone came out, the feature that immediately caught everyone’s attention was the touch. Before that, nobody had thought of replacing the stylus despite its limitations. Before Jobs, none had imagined a substitute. Jobs’ iPhone changed that.
 
That vision is needed once again. This time, to transform the enterprise world. The enterprise is still largely working with communication and collaboration solutions that belong to the pre-iPhone experience era. Newer solutions are being developed but they also require the employees to develop technical skills to be able to use them. The Enterprise needs a Steve Jobs to show them the possibilities and the Workplace of the future. Jobs once said, “A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.” That proof of the pudding needs to be kept on the table.

 

So, how would Jobs have replicated the Apple experience at the Workplace? To understand the transformation, we need to first understand the workplace itself. Today, the millennials make up a large part of the workforce. These are the people who have been touched by Jobs’ creation, and are used to efficiency and simplicity. On entering the work place, they expect a similar experience- in the way they work and the way they collaborate with colleagues and customers from across the globe. They expect advanced and intuitive solutions.
 
Business collaboration technology must evolve to serve the evolving employees – those who work from home or on the road; and it is essential that remote team members can collaborate seamlessly with employees in the office. Just like the Apple ecosystem, it would need a whole new ecosystem. But something that is not a closed environment but more inclusive. A platform of platforms that would allow everyone to be connected seamlessly without the restrictions of device or software. Imagine a collaboration tool that lets you communicate, ideate and disseminate content seamlessly while being completely location and device agnostic! That’s the power of a digital workplace platform. The real life ability to connect distributed workforce members visually to ensure active collaboration and team cohesion.

 
Such technology is making inroads into the boardrooms, huddle rooms of many MNCs, Fortune companies and top universities globally. They are the pioneers who are embracing visual collaboration to usher growth. More importantly, with visual collaboration, these organizations are enabling an Apple like experience for their employees, customers and suppliers by bringing their entire professional world at their fingertips using the power of cloud…quite literally!
 
What Would Steve Jobs’ ideal workplace collaboration solution offer?
 
Natural and easy to use UI: As humans our mind retains visual communication better than verbal ones. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “people remember 65 percent of what they learn through a combination of oral and visual communication, only 10 percent of what they learn through purely oral communication and 35 percent of what they learn from purely visual means.”  The Jobs-inspired solution would make meetings, discussions and brainstorms more visual and interactive. Something as easy to use as the smartphones of today themselves that everyone can operate out of the box.

 
Device and Operating System Agnostic: This is where even Jobs would have had to liberalize to include the millions-strong workforce globally. The ideal workplace collaboration solution must be platform and device agnostic. It should allow anyone to connect, share and collaborate seamlessly from any location. The cloud wasn’t a common term back in 2007, but today, the solution can leverage the power of the cloud to allow for real time sharing from any place, any device, any OS and at any time.
 
Intuitive, True Collaboration Features: Remember how the iPhone gave you your contacts, work email, music, Internet, voice, video all of it together in your palm? That comprehensiveness must be retained in the Enterprise world as well. Like the phone evolved from being a device for making calls to being the center of all communication, true collaboration would mean going many steps beyond typical video conferencing solutions to offering features such as multiple content, simultaneous sharing, Application level collaboration, Co-browsing, annotating etc to name a few.

 
Progressive companies are realising the importance of ‘experience’ in their workplace. The key to successful workplaces will lie in implementing a digital workplace technology that connects the employees and stakeholders more efficiently. It definitely needs a disruptive solution that offers greater collaboration sans the technical restrictions.
 
Taking a leaf from Steve Jobs’ book, the workplace can become a lot more collaborative, efficient, productive and fun. Maybe the kind of solution that he would have developed for the workplace already exists. It is just a matter of being ready for the transition.
 
The author is vice-president (APAC), Prysm Inc