The phrase digital transformation might lead to an eye roll and a groan from many IT people in financial services, such is the ubiquity of the phrase. But while we search for a new way to have the conversation, the conversation itself stays the same. Businesses internally and externally need to increasingly merge physical and digital practices to improve innovation and drive efficiency.
As digital transformation moves to its second phase across industries, financial services companies must advance their digital workplace strategies. While the digital workplace has evolved a lot in just a few years, organizations in the financial sector must be set up to continue to drive innovation and optimize efficiency internally.
Below, we’ll look at three technologies that can help make the digital workplace more automated, intelligent, and connected, to meet future demands and how physical infrastructure plays an important part in powering this change.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The report ‘Applying AI in the Digital Workplace’ by Gartner, suggests that AI is already impacting collaboration, human resources, IT service monitoring, knowledge management, and virtual employee assistants in the workplace.
But this is only scratching the surface. The smart, digital workplaces of the future will increasingly lean on AI to power innovation and optimize workflows. With the help of automation, for instance, time-consuming administrative tasks can be carried out quicker whilst reducing the risk of human error by eliminating the need of human input altogether. By streamlining admin heavy processes, employee productivity and engagement improves. Many global financial organizations already use automation to extract data, comply with regulations, and capture documents. This kind of automation will only increase as businesses embrace digital infrastructures and ecosystems.
While financial services organisations are at varying levels of maturity in their AI journey, it’s clear that it, and its offshoots machine learning and deep learning, will continue to play an increasingly crucial part in enabling the digital workplaces of the future. It goes without saying that the data volume growth that AI applications bring, requires a high-speed and high-quality infrastructure.
The Internet of Things (IoT)
Increasingly smart workplaces rely on better connectivity between employees, devices and departments both to analyze the impact and value of digitization and improve optimization efforts.
IoT infrastructure, apps, and devices are crucial enablers of the digital workplaces of the future. Connected devices improve employee productivity and collaboration in the digital workplace. This also allows for resources and team workflows to be managed more effectively.
It’s little wonder that, according to a report by Statista, retail banking organizations will lead the adoption of Big Data by a staggering 80%. But implementing IoT solutions undoubtedly means that the volume of data will increase, making it crucial for businesses to align their network infrastructure with this change.
Extended Reality (XR)
XR is an emerging term for all immersive technologies, including Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR) and those that are still being created. According to Forbes, the XR market is expected to reach $209 billion by 2022.
Immersive technologies have the potential to empower financial services companies in many ways.From taking advantage of remote expertise and recruiting talent, to collaborating with employees around the world, Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) enables remote virtualization for the digital workplace.
We still live in the era of video call drop out and bad signal, so real-time, global, collaborative XR initiatives point to the need for much more robust ecosystems and infrastructures. Like AI and IoT, remote virtualization is a big strain on the physical network and infrastructure assessment is required.
The implementation of these three disruptive technologies requires a solid, secure physical infrastructure – one that can provide the agility and scalability these innovations require. Managing increasing amounts of data requires more bandwidth, stability and flexibility. Every day, Panduit’s infrastructure solutions are unlocking performance and underpinning reliability in the technologies that your customers take for granted.
As you enter your next digital transformation chapter, bear in mind that your infrastructure is the critical foundation for a digital workplace that drives innovation.
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Today’s digital workplace is just the tool to increase employee satisfaction while reducing capital expenditures, so I’m surprised to hear that some businesses still haven’t gone through a digital transformation