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WORKPLACE
Nearly $1 billion of workplace services contract value will be coming up for renewal this year as we approach the three-year mark on agreements signed at the start of the pandemic.
Enterprises are prioritizing knowledge management tools, self-service portals and mobile devices in their future workforce strategies, so providers will need to be ready to deploy and support these technologies.
DATA WATCH
Planning the Workplace of the Future
As we discussed at our last two events in New York and London, we see ISG clients putting a lot of time and thought into planning their workplace of the future.
We expect the majority of workers will still be remote or part-time remote at the end of the year, and technology will continue to play a big role in making that happen. Specifically, our most recent ISG Buyer Behavior research indicates that enterprises are increasingly prioritizing self-service tools to support this distributed, remote workforce.
Given the priority being put on these types of technologies, we expect CIOs (and increasingly HR leaders) to be developing plans to better support a remote workforce and – no surprise – push more of that support responsibility to users themselves. That means they’ll expect their providers to be able to deliver on these plans as well.
Opportunity, With Caveats
As you can see in this week’s Data Watch, there was a huge spike in workplace services activity at the beginning of the pandemic (specifically in 2Q 2020) as firms had to build a new way of working – virtually overnight. And it’s many of those contracts that are starting to come up for renewal this year.
This is, of course, great news for providers with workplace services capabilities. But it’s also important to keep in mind that enterprises have had time to plan and think about the trends that will shape their future workplace – time they didn't have during the early phases of the pandemic.
And our research and interactions are indicating that these plans will include prioritizing the technologies mentioned above, as well as a big focus on driving employee productivity, improving end user experience and increasing internal collaboration.
About the authors
Stanton Jones
Stanton leads ISG's Index research, helping providers, investors and ISG clients make sense of the global IT services sector. Stanton’s weekly newsletter, the Index Insider, is read by thousands of market stakeholders each week. An ISG Digital Fellow, Stanton has been quoted in Fast Company, Forbes and CIO.com, and has appeared on national cable news.
