Towards a more human digital workplace

Abstract

Telework has tremendous potential benefits that can be the solution for problems as traffic jams, work-life conflict and even the environment. But there are still numerous obstacles that need to be overcome for telework to live up to its full potential. The proposed solution to overcome these problems is by developing more ‘human’ solutions, which means to innovate from a human perspective. This project proposes a concept that can be seen as a step towards this vision: “A more human digital workplace”. It provides one example of how technological innovations can occur through user understanding. This example has taken the form of a concept called The Hotline. A need for better cross-site collaboration has been identified and through numerous Tryout iterations the Hotline concept occured. The concept has been validated with end users. In a survey 70% of the respondents wanted the Hotline to stay and 44% was willing to pay over five euros each month for the service. At the same time organizations as Barco, the case company of this thesis, struggle with understanding their user. This is a common problem of larger organizations. Barco is a business to business technology company specialized in image processing technology. Barco has three departments: Entertainment, Healthcare and Enterprise. The last department offers solutions for the workplace such as Clickshare, a wireless presentation tool. The Enterprise department has a focus on the future of work making it the perfect candidate to receive this thesis. In parallel this project also shows the taken steps from idea to user value. The process can serve as input for best practices in the fuzzy front end of new product development.