How to Prepare for the WFA Revolution'Let You Work Anywhere'

The traditional physical office, which has long been a fixed work environment, is disappearing. This is because various economic sectors around the world experienced the advantages and disadvantages of telecommuting during the 2020 pandemic crisis.

The emergence of hybrid physical-virtual work environments

Currently, virtually every large IT company, from Google to VMware, is giving up indefinitely for employees to return to their existing offices. According to a recent corporate survey conducted by 451 Research, S&P Global Market Intelligence's new technology research division, 80% of respondents have implemented or expanded a broader telecommuting policy, with 67% retaining some telecommuting policies, at least for the long term or permanently. Plan.

A recent London Business School study published by the Harvard Business Review (HBR) found that knowledgeable employees also faced the challenges of working from home with confidence in general. As research authors Julian Birkinshaw, Jordan Cohen, and Powell Stats have argued, the productivity of telecommuting is increasing. In a comparative survey of interviews conducted with knowledge employees in 2013 and 2020, the amount of time spent in large-scale meetings was reduced by 12% and the amount of time spent interacting with customers or external partners increased by 9%. Knowledgeable staff said they were performing 50% more activities at the individual's choice, and 50% less at someone's request.

Still, the physical offices sometimes shared with others have not completely disappeared. Few employees agreed to permanently shut down an existing office that was shared by several people. Most companies have the right to ask their employees to return to one of these physical offices at some point. And few organizations have succeeded in supporting a completely equal infrastructure for telecommuting and office attendance workers.

For knowledge employees, at least, the global economy is rapidly shifting towards a 'Work From Anywhere (WFA)'. In the future, most knowledgeable employees will work in a hybrid work environment where patterns are constantly changing, where physical and virtual fields are fused. And this change will create a work culture, behavior, and process focused on a hybrid distributed WFA productivity. Even this new order is changing the working environment in new and surprising ways, such as in the filmmaking sector.

Enterprise IT can support WFA

How will work location according to 'New Normal' affect corporate IT infrastructure patterns? The role of key technologies that enable social distancing, more productive remote collaboration, and more comprehensive biological detection will be expanded in the post-pandemic social order to be continued.

In a decentralized environment, most employees will be able to use the traditional office when needed, or return home or move to another site depending on the situation. Employers will assist employees in using general remote collaboration, cloud computing, robotic process automation, and other sophisticated productivity tools.

To stay productive, smart organizations will provide infrastructure standards for automated cloud-based security, backup, recovery, and compliance services. When employees work in shared physical offices, home offices, clients, or on-site, all these solid services will always be available to all employees.

A recent industry initiative aimed at solving the challenges of a new work environment is the Modern Computing Alliance (MCA). The new consortium MCA, created by Google and other leading technology companies, defines a universal technology industry approach to support a hybrid environment that helps connect, converge, and seamlessly move between physical and virtual workplaces. The consortium includes several companies, including Dell, Intel, Box, Citrix, Imprivata, Octa, RingCentral, Slack, VMware, and Zoom. MCA is developing standards and interoperable technologies for distributed work in a cross-platform multi-cloud world.

Converging the Internet of Things (IoT) into the WFA infrastructure

Established before the Corona 19 crisis and led by Google, the MCA deals with collaboration, identity, security, transparency, and guidance impacts in telecommuting. Other details will have to wait until the first half of 2021, when the first specific plans are announced. Initial announcements only stated their intention to advance simplification (device management), analysis (unique devices and users), and optimization (device level, hardware boot performance, employee workflow).

Considering that one of the main drivers was the ongoing pandemic, MCA's efforts will also include biometrics technology that permeates traditional offices and remote environments. Thus, IoT needs to be integrated into the overall structure of how organizations manage the planning, monitoring, and control. Furthermore, it is an era where various sensors are so abundant in public and private spaces that people can actually imagine.

In decentralized remote workplaces, IoT-based sensors send real-time feeds on facility indicators such as room temperature, lighting, availability, and safety, and joint thermostats and other local IoT actuators take automated actions to ensure that various indicators are linked to corporate health and safety. , Productivity, and other policies. The vast majority of IoT sensors and actuators owned by remote workers will be built into existing smartphones and multiple edge devices. IoT endpoints will also be deployed in company-provided portable terminal devices, devices, and robots that employees will use on a transitional basis at workplaces such as vehicles or customer sites.

IoT-based sensor networks can also power a robotic cleaning platform that automatically sterilizes spaces to keep employees in various locations safe from infectious diseases. Employees will need to download and install proximity and biometric apps on their smartphones before entering the sanitized public space. Smart cameras and thermal sensors will detect when the sanitized space can become infected. Actions such as restrictions on admission, warnings, various restrictions, automation strategies for disinfection, and other various infrastructure-based responses can be taken to prevent contagion even in public offices.

The potential of digital twin technology in a hybrid work environment

The fusion of virtual and physical environments is another feature of the new WFA world. MCA doesn't seem to be addressing it, but this raises the need to integrate digital twin technologies. The digital twin paradigm is a proven technology in industrial IoT, and will soon become an essential technology in not only hybrid distributed work environments but also knowledge labor and non-sales department work.

Basically, digital twins are data structures that reflect physical entities throughout their lifecycle. The twin tracks the physical entity's current configuration, status, condition, location, interface, sensor readings, operational characteristics, maintenance history, and other attributes.

Taking aim at this new industrial order, Microsoft recently launched the Azure Digital Twin Service. After a two-year development period, Azure Digital Twin enables industrial designers to plan, model, deploy, monitor, and control IoT/edge-based physical environments equipped with sensors. It supports physical environment modeling with DTDL (Digital Twins Definition Language) developed by Microsoft and collects configuration data from deployed IoT sensors to track all changes in physically mapped areas.

The trend toward developing collaborative robots for hybrid environments is also suitable for digital twin products. Microsoft already considers Johnson Controls, an IT technology leader in architecture, to be a user of the Azure Digital Twin. Johnson Control uses Azure and other tools to manage the energy usage, work environment optimization, and safety workflows of distributed physical facilities.

Immersive reality that connects physical and virtual work environments

Teleworking tends to lack the fast, interactive support you expect from on-site technical or management staff.

So the need for immersive reality emerged. This includes augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR). As immersive reality is applied to the developer's toolkit, it is possible to develop apps that provide a direct interactive experience even in the most virtualized homework environment.

Seeming to pave the way for the future, Microsoft's Azure Digital Twin includes cloud-based geospatial graphs that track people, places, and devices. It also supports the development of digital twin apps that use 3D or 4D visualization, physics-based simulation, and AI-based occurrence modeling capabilities. A few months before the launch announcement, Microsoft unveiled three new IR products tailored to shape the vision.

• The HoloLens 2 headset sold worldwide fuses the dynamic superimposed subtitles of AR and the simulated environment of VR.
• A new IR service called Azure Object Anchors is in the private preview phase. HoloLens headsets can recognize objects in real life and dynamically map-related instructions or visualizations.
• Dynamics 365 Remote Assist allows people from physically disparate locations to collaborate and troubleshoot in a shared IR environment.

Industry effort is also needed to facilitate more collaboration

The collective office shared by several people will not disappear, but again, it will not become the basic workplace used by most knowledge workers as before. Not necessarily a bad thing. Personally, I've only been to the office every day for one of the past 22 years, but I have no desire to go back to that small farm-like world. It's not because you're an anti-social person, but because you just want to focus on your work. I'm a much more productive person in my home office.

Increasingly in the future, business units, departments, and individuals will be able to adapt to changing circumstances. We hope that the IT industry can work together quickly to define the real vision of the infrastructure, tools, and standards needed for the 'work anywhere' revolution.

First of all, it would be good if collaboration between industry groups leading the technological standardization required for the new distributed hybrid work environment world. At least, efforts in this direction include the MCA, the Digital Twin Consortium of the Object Management Group (OMG), the Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Standards Committee of the IEEE, and the Robotics Industry Association (RIA). I want to see them gather together and discuss.