Feature
Generative AI may have dominated the headlines in 2024, but the year's most popular articles found you digging into some of the fundamental problems in the workplace: how to untangle and simplify the tools you delivered to employees, what to do when a vendor shutters a much-loved tool, how to capture knowledge in our increasingly complex digital ecosystems, and yes, a look at where generative AI might be heading next.
While the technology may have been the starting point, all of the articles acknowledge the human element which makes or breaks any of these initiatives.
Top 10 Digital Workplace Articles of 2024
1. Chris Harrer on How Comcast Transformed Digital Chaos Into an Award-Winning Employee Experience
"We had 15 intranets, give or take, but everyone had a platform or a type of intranet. And bringing them into one ecosystem, into the ComcastNow ecosystem, was a big goal of mine .... Just to bring them all together was one big undertaking. But we also wanted to create an intranet that can have everybody's content on it, so you can find what you need. Our old intranet, which was very good, it served its purposes well, but it was a corporate comms news-type of intranet. And we wanted to expand on that and create a bit more of an experience and have a lot more integrations and all that type of fun stuff."
2. Will Your Next Hire Be an AI Agent?
"Promising as the capabilities of AI agents are, 'it’s still early days,' Mueller said. That’s a sentiment echoed by Cox, who said that the circumstances around agentic AI are such that its capabilities will grow quickly."
3. Minimizing the Fallout When a Vendor Sunsets Your Digital Workplace Product
"There’s nothing you can do to prevent your vendor withdrawing or retiring a product, but you can certainly keep an eye out for warning signs. Has investment in the product seemingly dried up? Is the product roadmap a shadow of its former self? Is the company seemingly focused on other priorities, such as generative AI or the metaverse?"
4. Microsoft Launches Copilot for Finance as Generative AI Gets Specialized
"Specialized generative AI solutions will coexist with general AI solutions — not to be confused with general AI — catering to different needs and applications, he continued. In fact, the quick evolution of the field means that sometime in the future, the lines between the two will be very blurred where the models might have the ability to adapt themselves to different domains."
5. The Gap Between Value and Functionality in the Digital Workplace Tools
"'Once we strip off all the bells and whistles and set aside the narratives that promise to make work fun for everyone, DW technology is, at its core, best positioned as an aggregator,' digital workplace consultant Ross Cavanaugh said. 'The leaders in this vertical are the ones doing the best work to integrate the many disparate software solutions required to get work done.'"
6. Microsoft Unbundles Teams From Microsoft 365 Globally. What It Means for the Digital Workplace
"On April 1, Microsoft announced it was unbundling Teams from Microsoft 365 and Office 365. It wasn't an April Fools' joke."
7. So Much Choice, So Little Control
"These incremental changes have been compounded by an assumption that more technology will solve things for us. That smart tools will help us collaborate better, solve problems and save time.
Sadly, the opposite is true. This isn’t to say that technology can’t do the above — some decent tools out there can really help us. It’s just that we muddle through with a mix of tech without really understanding the nuances of one collaboration tool over the other, what habits we need to change to really leverage them, and what we need to replace."
8. 5 Things You Can Do Today – for Free – to Improve Your Digital Employee Experience
"Once a quarter or so, we hold a Digital Workplace learning session with our Executive Assistants (EAs). The trend began when a few of the more tech-savvy EAs started asking questions about teams and invited us to one of their monthly group meetings to answer questions. It was so successful we decided to make it a regular meeting series."
9. Meta Shutters Workplace. Now What?
"Workplace's early success never translated into long-term momentum. Although the company gained fans (and superfans) among customers for its ease of use, swift adoption rates and facilitation in creating vibrant communities, people also complained of getting lost in the flood of user-generated content, poor video conferencing capabilities and the lack of strong administrator controls."
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10. Preserve Your Organization's Critical Knowledge With Knowledge Maps
"Knowledge mapping isn’t easy, but there is no better way to understand the most important knowledge-related risks and opportunities in your organization."