The workplace as we know continues to evolve with much of that change driven by technology.
Companies planning for 2022 and beyond can shape their priorities and budgets with a deeper focus on technology, thanks to some insights from Microsoft MVPs.
The best way to spend your technology dollars
When it comes to budgeting, understanding what's happening in organizations similar to yours and in the industry—particularly what is working and what isn’t—is helpful. Likewise, taking a closer look at how other organizations solve their IT challenges can help your company look ahead and prepare for technology challenges and opportunities in 2022.
Both the biggest and smallest organizations worldwide use Microsoft technology, so we convened a panel of 6 Microsoft MVPs from Canada, the United States, and the UK to discover tips and strategies for the Microsoft ecosystem.
Microsoft MVPs work with hundreds of customers across the globe, including some of the biggest names in the business. Through this exposure, MVPs gain a wealth of practical insights.
Our panel provided honest feedback about what's working and what needs improvement in Microsoft 365 Office Apps & Services. This feedback can help your organization:
Get the scoop on what other organizations are doing today and planning for tomorrow
Expand awareness of industry trends
Prepare by knowing what's likely to come next
In particular, our MVP panelists said organizations today need:
Better change management and better adoption
Improved user experience
Solid governance and compliance
Better integration
More opportunities for Microsoft Partners
Better change management and better adoption
Earlier this year, ORIGAMI conducted a study with a random sample of IT leaders from North America and Europe. When asked about their chief concerns, these leaders agreed with the Microsoft MVPs that technology adoption and change management top the list.
We took a closer look to determine why this is such a critical issue for organizations of all sizes.
Top concerns of IT leaders
Adoption is amongst the highest concerns for IT leaders.
Marc D. Anderson, Office Services and Apps MVP, sheds some light. Marc runs a consulting company called Sympraxis Consulting with an elite team of consultants specializing in building intranets, migrating to SharePoint Online, and reorganizing existing SharePoint tenants.
He says that:
"The level of enhancements from Microsoft is so fast right now that it's almost impossible to keep up!"
Marc added that he would like to see better communication about changes to the platform.
The fast pace of changes is not exclusive to professionals; in fact, end-users struggle the most when it comes to these constant changes.
Frequent changes require more training and support, and that's what Asif Rehmani's company VisualSP specializes in. Here is how Asif describes the situation:
"Our clients at VisualSP are interested in making sure that they are getting good ROI from their enterprise application investments. The only way to ensure good ROI is to make sure that there is the effective use of these applications by the users."
Asif feels many of his customer's Gen Z employees are used to lighter applications that work wherever they are without downloading a desktop application. He predicts that Microsoft, over time, will enhance the functionality of its Office and Teams web apps so that they no longer require downloading a bulky desktop app.
From the IT perspective, not having to maintain a desktop app and having users access what they need right from the browser is also a great benefit. However, many organizations are struggling with providing this experience due to security and compliance reasons. For now, Asif's company tries to reduce the friction by providing great contextual help experiences to users to enhance the adoption of many enterprise web applications.
Clearly, better adoption is directly tied to user experience.
Improved user experience
User experience touches many areas and is closely related to integrated employee experience, where all applications work together to support user flow.
Cindy Lewis specializes in Microsoft Project/Project Online and Project Management training for her customers through her business 4 Pillars of Success®. She shared a story that sheds some light on how user experience impacts employees:
"Clients continue to demonstrate to me that even though they have access to a complex set of features, they often just need the basic features to run the business. For example, multi-national companies are running major projects with Microsoft Planner and Project for the Web. They may not need a more complex solution such as Project Online or Project Desktop client. Clients often tell me they really want a nice interface."
This story confirms the experience that Asif mentioned earlier. Likewise, our own research from this summer concurs that IT leaders are concerned about employees thinking their corporate systems being too hard to use, which negatively affects adoption.
How do you know you have an adoption problem?
Leaders fear that users will feel that the system is difficult to use and abandon using it.
However, having too many smaller tools can also create confusion.
If tools are becoming more granular, then there will be more of them to choose from. The more users can choose their tool, the more data might live in more places, even if they are all on the Microsoft platform.
This abundance of available tools raises the question from users,
"I have all these tools. What do I use when?"
It also sparks concern about the governance from IT and compliance teams who wonder:
"Our data lives in 100 different places. How do we ensure compliance?"
Fortunately, one of our MVP panellists focuses almost exclusively on compliance and has insight on this topic.
Solid governance and compliance
Joanne C. Klein is an independent consultant and her work centers around ensuring compliance for organizations.
Here is the shift Joanne is seeing:
"Although many of my past engagements were focused on road-mapping the compliance journey for an organization, the focus has now shifted to implementing real controls [...]. I believe this is due to increased pressure from regulators. I work with both compliance professionals—Privacy, Security, Records Managers, HR, Legal, Risk—as well as IT technical professionals and I often find myself ‘bridging the gap’ between these two disciplines. It's fascinating to see these two areas come together – a necessary requirement for success."
Joanne believes Microsoft will make more progress in the security and compliance controls extending across the modern workplace tools users engage with today. She adds that organizations face tremendous pressure not only from regulators but also from customers, partners, and employees to ensure they're meeting their obligations, particularly in the data privacy space.
Joanne is predicting that this will call for more automated tools, reporting, and auditing to support their efforts.
Better integration
This summer, we asked our own study participants to name their top 4 technology needs, and 56% of them called out "integration with work apps."
Top features called out by IT leaders
Integration with other work apps is the top priority amongst IT leaders.
Not surprisingly, users find it hard and unnecessary to log into several work applications. They want things to be available right there and then. IT leaders also say that they don't want to pay for separate applications to allow users to complete their workflow or simply view a report.
Cindy Lewis tells us another interesting story that shows how users' experience is closely tied to integrating applications to support employees' flow of work.
"Every client I work with tells me that no matter what role they are in, they have to make reports for their boss or executive leadership. All programs have features and reports built in, but I still hear that some things are too complex or hard to find for the average worker,” she said. “While I often share solutions available in Power Automate and Power BI, users often feel they should not need to go elsewhere."
Joanne C. Klein agrees that one of the things she'd like to see improved is
"Anything and everything to make it easier for an end-user to be compliant without interrupting their workflow."
Microsoft's modern experience in SharePoint has made integration much easier, but there are many legacy customers who still use the "classic" experience. Will "classic" go away with so many enterprise and on-prem customers still using it? That's what Marc D. Anderson wants to know.
Microsoft is indeed focusing a great deal more on the cloud, and Asif Rehmani predicts that in 2022, the ecosystem for Microsoft 365 will grow to include business applications in Dynamics 365. He adds that Microsoft 365 services will become a one-stop-shop for collaboration, communication, business services, and everything in between.
In Asif's opinion, Microsoft Teams will continue to gain momentum and will become even more mainstream with users around the world. He's not the only one putting bets on MS Teams.
Lesley Crook, Office Apps and Services MVP at UK company CloudWay, primarily works on adoption and change management for her customers. Lesley predicts that MS Teams will see more integration into employees' flow of work, including Mesh avatars for MS Teams meetings for those bad hair days! To that end, it is hard not to mention Viva. The new kid on the block, Viva has many of our own customers wondering where it fits with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem. Lesley also thinks that Viva could benefit from its modules connecting better together, including Ally.io—the fifth module just added to Viva. This new module promises to align people’s work with team goals and company mission giving employees more clarity and purpose on the work they are doing, Lesley shares more on her new blog.
With so many integrations being called out, it's only natural to turn to Microsoft partners for help.
More opportunities for Microsoft Partners
MVPs often collaborate closely with the Microsoft product team while working independently or within other organizations.
Christian Buckley, Office Apps & Services MVP and Microsoft Regional Director, manages the global alliance between Microsoft and AvePoint, a renowned Microsoft partner, and says that he is excited about the expanded focus on improving the employee experience with the Microsoft Viva offerings and associated features, and he is
"Mostly interested in seeing the Viva APIs opened up to ISV partners so that partners can develop solutions against the 4 (soon to be 5) Viva solutions."
Availability of advanced integrations such as APIs naturally require a mature, well-adopted application. Developing APIs before wide user adoption is simply illogical, so adoption is a prerequisite to advanced integrations. With new tools like Viva, it might take a while for a wide array of APIs to be accessible.
In essence, it's a chicken-and-egg problem. Adoption can impact partners' ability to integrate, and partners' appetite to build integrations may depend on wider customer adoption.
Christian remains optimistic, and he predicts that
"We're going to see deeper integrations and user experiences around the fluid framework (Microsoft Loop components) that will fill some of the major gaps we have with multi-tenancy, task management, and external collaboration scenarios."
Microsoft Loop, just announced in November 2021, might require more than a simple set of APIs. Unlike MS Teams, Loop has workspaces and pages that appear to store data. If Microsoft wants to expedite the adoption of Loop, it might need to enable vendors to migrate from existing non-Microsoft equivalents to Loop.
The bottom line
Microsoft's new product announcements show that the company is committed to improving the user experience and giving its customers better choices. There are opportunities for better integration in 2022 and beyond. For partners to take on integration, they will need help from Microsoft in providing necessary product APIs and roadmaps. It may be too early for some new products, but partners remain optimistic. Ultimately, Microsoft MVPs see a lot of potential and promise in the year to come.
What are your predictions?
Do you see the trends our MVP panel is sharing in your company?
Care to share your thoughts?
Everyone would love to hear your thoughts in a specific context, so please, add them in the comments below.
Yaroslav Pentsarskyy is a Digital Workplace Advisor at ORIGAMI. Yaroslav has been awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for 8 years in a row and has authored and published 4 intranet books.
Yaroslav is also a frequent presenter at industry conferences and events, such as the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and Microsoft Ignite.