Thank you so much. I am so excited to be here. Digital Work place and DWX is one of my favorite things to be at and to talk about. And today, Isaac and I are gonna take you a little bit deeper into how you can get buy on buy in on your digital workplace initiative. So to get started, there is a lot happening in today's world of work. Everything from the macroeconomic shifts to the evolution of talent and digital acceleration. If we look at these things one by one, on the macroeconomic side, we have everything from the pandemic to the impending recession and the very unpredictable stock market that are really influencing the world as we know it, our workplace, and just everyday day to day life. In the middle, we have evolution of talent, and there's a lot happening here as well. The pandemic caused a shift of balance of power from employer led to employee led. We've seen a lot of layoffs happen, and now there's a new trend around quiet quitting, which is just a new way of sharing what's been going on for some time. And lastly, on the digital acceleration front, the point here is that business must still go on, and companies still need to invest in the right technologies that help them to maintain a competitive advantage. The funny thing is we often tend to think of these three big trend areas as distinct, but they're very much interrelated. And the takeaway we have here is that change and uncertainty are here to stay. Businesses are always going to need to retain top talent. And lastly, technology really can be an enabler, again, to provide that competitive advantage for your company, for your employees, and even for your customers. I really love talking digital workplace and workplace in general because I often hear that it's a soft ROI. It's hard to get investment. It's hard to show, the benefit of it. But I find that really to be shocking and surprising, especially when you look at the stats that matter. So let's take a look at what we see here. First, we see that employees spend nearly fifty percent of their day searching for the knowledge to do their jobs effectively. And I think that we can all relate to that in our day to day work environment when we're not able to find what we need to get our jobs done. Secondly, forty two percent of employees report feeling less confident about their work performance as a result of not being able to find or not sure if they're finding the right and accurate information within their day to day work environment. The third bullet highlights the fact that thirty one percent of employees said the frustration of not being able to find information made them feel burned out. And lastly, the stat that I think everyone here should be paying attention to and highlighting is that sixteen percent of employees said that not being able to find the right information or having the right knowledge and resources to do their job made them want to leave their company. Now these stats come from a relevance report that we put out, and it's from four thousand external employees in the US and the UK sharing their experiences. So for anyone thinking that, you know, workplace is hard to show the benefit of, these stats alone show that it's important. The funny thing also is that we talk the intelligent workplace and we talk the future of work, but these things are here today and now. When Isaac and I were rehearsing and preparing for you to on this presentation, I had these capabilities on the right, to to demonstrate the intelligent solutions and capabilities that exist today that should be used in the workplace today. And Isaac said, you need to put a happy face on that slide because that is what is the most important thing, of this presentation, of this session, and when you're talking digital workplace generally. And that's because these capabilities, which we often put or invest time in on the customer side, can and should be used on the employee side for one sole reason. Yes. To make employees happy and satisfied, but to help them be able to do their work more productively, more effectively. So the point is these intelligent capabilities are here today. It's not tomorrow. It's not the future. It's here today and now. But this begs the question, why aren't companies investing, or why aren't they investing appropriately in workplace in the employee experience? I thought about this, and I I I asked myself a few questions. Is it a language or a vocabulary problem? Is it a skills problem, or is it a matter of perspective? Because when you take a step back and you look at employee experience and customer experience, these two key stakeholders, which we often seem to talk about as different and distinct and information, and data resources. So if we think about that for a minute, when your customers come searching your sites, trying to find information, trying to buy from you, let's say they buy and now they're contacting your customer support, you. Let's say they buy and now they're contacting your customer support. Guess what? They're asking for information that your employees also need need to provide them, need to be knowledgeable about when those questions come in. As an example, if you're a financial adviser and you're meeting with your client, do you have the latest and greatest information on the products and tools that they should be using? And are you able to access that information seamlessly without having to spend so much time to find it, therefore making you feel less confident in how in how and what you're presenting to your to your customer. So I really think it's a matter of perspective, but that's why we have the ability to ask the experts. So with that, I would like to bring Isaac into the conversation. And if you don't know Isaac, he is the founder of Star CIO, but he's also a former CIO and CTO at notable enterprise companies, including BusinessWeek and McGraw Hill. So, Isaac, are you ready to answer some of these challenging workplace questions? Absolutely. I'm really excited about this this about this topic just as much as you are because, I mean, when we have an effective workplace, we have happier employees, and they're more productive. Absolutely. So I have my first question for you, which is why aren't workplace projects being prioritized? Wow. That's a great question, and I gotta answer it this way. You know, Juanita, we've shot ourselves in the foot. You know, we've sold this bill of goods every time there's a new round of technology and capabilities and a new reason to invest in Workplace. You know, it started probably fifteen, twenty years ago when we started you know, if you ask the CIO, they said we put SharePoint up there. That's where all of our information is. When we onboard employees, when we have to find information, we're gonna put it all in SharePoint. And if it was driven by HR, they would say communications has put up a communications portal. This is where all the employees have to go for their information, and we're done and and over with that. And you look at the way people work today, and there's information in my tools. You know? It's in my CRM. It's in my ERP. It's in my backlog if I'm in engine in engineering. So I have different tools that have all of this information. It's in my knowledge bases and my document folders, which, you know, large organization has several of these running around. And it's, you know, it's also external information. Right? And so I'm the employee. I'm working all over the place. I'm working at home today. I'm working in the office. I'm trying to get things done. I'm spending half of my time searching because not everything is in the same place. Right? And, you know, it's hard to justify this because, you know, the very first thing that we have to do is agree that this is a key problem. Right? And some of the stats you shared earlier are are are indicative of that. But for me, it's really the stress that we're putting on employees when we're asking them to continually to do more, to continue to innovate. And, you know, they're spending their time just trying to find the information, where where you know, what's the policy around something, or what is who's the right people responsible for a particular decision? Or, you know, maybe I do a search and thirty different documents come Barca. Which one is the right one for me to pay attention to? So these are all the things that are impacting that. And, you know, for me, this is really about going back to the executive board and saying, look, I need to make sure my team is happy during a period of time when there's a lot of people leaving and looking for other jobs, that they're productive, that they feel like they're getting their job done, that I'm replacing the email and the water cooler conversations that were happening while we were in person, and we need to continue to accelerate and be able to innovate. So this is these are my reasons. If you look, I I had a blog post a few months ago talking about, search and employee experience is one of the top things CIOs really should be investing in in twenty twenty three, and I'm happy to share some more insights around that. Thank you. Thank you for that. That's a really great perspective. Do you believe that we need to revisit the definition of digital workplace or intelligent workplace? Because you talked about all of these systems and applications and how they created inefficiencies. So how would you define digital workplace? Well, let's let's talk about two things. We have the systems that every employee uses to get their job done, that have workflow in it. We know to go in and add a customer into the CRM or check-in code into our systems. We have our systems that we all use. And then there's everything else. Right? How do we learn? How do we collaborate? How do we find information? And previously, when we're in the office, we could do all of that by asking people, by hosting lots of meetings, by going to the water cooler and talking to our people. So when I think about the digital workplace, I think about how do we replace that. Right? How do we make a global organization effective when we're trying to do so much more faster that we're working with partners and a lot of the information that we need to use our job is not behind the firewall just in what we create inside our organization. It also includes information outside of our organization. That's the digital workplace, and it enables my employees to see very personalized information. What do I need as a developer versus what do I need as a salesperson? What do I need in marketing? I may be looking at the entire product, the same end to end workflow, and being a and and asking different questions of it, looking for different information. And then I think about, you know, from the customer support lens. Right? Customer support is the front line responding to customers. They're in your sup support systems. They're looking at, tickets, but they don't have access to product information, to documentation. They don't know who the end user is and what information you have around them in in your CRM, and they don't have information around them that's available from the social environments that they participate in. So I wanna bring all that information together, personalize it, make it accessible, and make it easy for the end user to find what they're looking for. It makes complete sense. And I like that you call out the fact that there's multiple types of workers that need different types of information. I'd love to hear from from you. We we talk about the future of work all the time. What do you think is different these days about the digital workplace or the future of work as we talk about it beyond being an information portal? Well, look, you know, the simple answer a couple years ago is we're gonna put all of our information in one place. Today, all that information is all over the place, but I need to personalize it and make it accessible. So I think that's one way of looking at this. Another way of looking at this is I'm trying to connect the entire ecosystem. So what employees need to do their do their jobs, what customers are gonna get access, can they get access to the right sets of information but one set of sources, and can customer support also get that information. So I'm thinking about how do I do this effectively. I'm thinking about different types of use cases that also come up, the ability to look at information in different languages, the ability to search with different languages, what's the overall taxonomy that we're building as an organization so that we can share information. So these are just some of the things that go into it. But I think part of, you know, what's different here is, you know, it's not just about how effective the organization is. It's about how employees are satisfied with the tools that we're providing to them, with the ability for them to get their job done. Because quite frankly, I, you know, I answered a question about this earlier today, you know, about this notion of quiet quitters. You know, if you don't have the right information, the right technology, the right capabilities in front of them, quieter quiet quitters become quitters. Right? They leave. Right? They look for organizations where they can be more effective. And I think that's just something people have to have in the back of their mind as they're looking to outfit their organizations over the next few years. Yeah. It makes complete sense, and exactly what we're seeing in the stats and the numbers show us. I wanted to move to the popular topic that I alluded to a little bit earlier, EX versus CX. How do you think teams can get leaders to understand the importance of EX and not just CX? Yeah. You know, it's, I I think that all goes back to your question also about investment. Right? We think about when when we think about transformation, even I say this, we think about customer experience first. Right? We wanna improve it. We wanna build more products and capabilities around that. But as part of that, we need to be able to service those, customers. We need employees to be able to get access to information and that's really a different mindset. We built capabilities five, ten, fifteen years ago. We would think about one set of tools and one set of platforms that were customer facing, another set of tools and another set of platforms that were employee facing. And what we found is that we couldn't connect the information. Right? We didn't we had different tools with different databases, with different taxonomies. We had no way of connecting this information. And I gotta tell you, that's changed a lot. I I've managed development teams. I've put search engines in place. I've used technologies like low code and no code. These are problems that existed because we were working with a lot of siloed platforms. And today, you know, when I put a search engine in, I can go and connect to dozens of information sources without bringing programmers in. I can start off with a small group who's gonna look at employee experience in a specific function. Maybe it's field service. Maybe it's in my customer support team. Wherever the problem is happening, wherever the first indicative area where I can create an impact, I'm gonna create a taxonomy that works for that group. I'm gonna create a personalized experience for them. And then I'm gonna use that to go and, use that as a kind of a beachhead to create a capability that other places in my organization could start taking, advantage of. Juanita, you know this, but I wrote a white paper on this for Covio. I talk about the collaboration that's required to bring a platform like this together. You know, you talk about we have the capability, but the real promise of bringing this technology into the organization is it requires my CIO department partner with the knowledge management teams, to partner with the CMO, to partner with customer support. And that's how we're starting to connect that entire ecosystem of customer to employee, customer support, and getting access to a common set of information that we're personalizing. That's great. Thank you for sharing that. I, I wanted to ask you. You know, I I totally agree with you. It takes a lot of people to to to bring a lot of people together to make things happen. In terms of getting that buy in for a project, do you think that being able to show key ROI or KPIs is important, or or how would you guide our audience here who's really trying to figure out how they do this well, how they get buy in well? Do they have to show ROI, KPI, or what does that mean, for internal teams? Yeah. I think part of that answer relies on you understanding what your organization wants from, justifying an investment. If you look at some of my writing, including my writing in Digital Trailblazer, I say, Look, there's just some investments that you're going to have to look at over the long haul to see what the ROI, what the financial impact looks like. So let's bring it to, something that we can look at here and today as an indicator that we're heading in the right direction. And when I think about digital workplace and I think about employee experience, I'm really thinking about employee satisfaction scores, going back to real basics, interviewing employees from different departments with different job functions at different levels and asking them pointed questions about, can I find the information that you're looking for, would you recommend, this your job to somebody else to come work for this organization based on the access to information? And I you know, that's where I would start from. Right? When you're really looking at what, a digital workplace technology is gonna impact in the short run, that's what I'm gonna look at. Now in the long run, I'm gonna look at retention. I'm gonna look at the ability to, hire employees effectively because I can go out and market to them and say, we have high employee satisfaction rates. We have high customer support satisfaction rates when I hire into the customer support groups, I can get awards at times for being able to demonstrate that I have these technologies in place. And so that's kind of the long detail picture that I wanna be able to, create, but it really starts with some basic ROI. And, again, in that white paper, I shared a whole bunch of financial metrics. When you look at, you know, the ability to, onboard a customer effectively, what's that, turnaround time? What is the, ability to service an employee when they ask a question? It's another rich source of information when I open a help desk ticket. How fast can that service desk respond because they have access to information? So there's a number of indicators that can show that you're improving your workplace that over time is gonna yield financial results once, you have it in place and scaled. That makes a ton of sense, and I love that you focus on short term and long term. I think both are really important. The last question I'll ask you, and you've sort of answered some of this, but I think oftentimes it's hard people to really understand how they navigate the organization or how they get that buy in. So as a CEO and in your experience, and you worked on a ton of internal projects, what can people do to really get this to move forward? Alright. You ready for this one, Edith? This is the best piece of advice that I can give to everybody. I know you're fans of digital workplace. I know you wanna see higher investments and a higher priority. You need two things in your arsenal to be able to get on people's razor. You need an offensive strategy. Where are you gonna actually make a significant impact in your organization that's aligned to their strategy? For some groups, it's gonna be around, you know, how, you know, how do we address employee experience? How do we improve employee satisfaction? For other groups, it's going to be around things like, you know, we're planning to do five acquisitions over the next year. How do we reduce the risk of tribal knowledge and expand our capability to support and scale two or three of these businesses because we have access to information, a common way to personalize information and the ability to scale that capability, as we add employees to it. So those are examples of going on the offense. The defensive side starts looking at efficiencies, productivity, things where I'm gonna potentially reduce costs. If you're, for example, going back to your CIO and trying to make a business case, I talk about the impact of technical debt in the white paper, how many different platforms have search in them that need to be maintained and continue to be worked on by our different teams, and as over time you start bringing this and say I'm gonna have a centralized capability to do search, I can start shutting down capabilities and platforms around this. Same thing, if you want a supporter in, in your compliance group or in your security group, instead of providing access to a thousand, two thousand employees going into thirty or forty different tools that I need to now figure out who's getting access to what information, I'm centralizing that access through a search in interface and then putting the the policies in place of who gets access to what information in a centralized way, a lot more efficient way of doing that. So you wanna look at what your organization's looking for. You wanna look for something and hang on to something that's really offensive, something that's gonna build a capability aligned to strategy, and then also look at a defensive strategy in terms of productivity, compliance, or cost, that you can, actually sell as part of that picture. Great summary and great metaphors. And in case that wasn't enough and you're not convinced, we we put up a list of final recommendations for you, a lot inspired also from your book, Isaac Digital Trailblazer. So, my favorite is be dramatic about the need. Drama sells, but there's several other important bullet points here that I think you've also shared as well. Would you like to highlight any of these? Yeah. Being dramatic is really helpful. I mean, if you could point at a metric that looks really poor, that you can address with an investment, that's what you wanna hang your hat on. But what I'm gonna call here is, you know, one of the things we've made mistakes with in the past around workplace technologies is trying to do everything at once. Right? Trying to get one portal that, everybody gets access to that's gonna serve everybody's needs and I think you have to apply this with some agility, look at a group that's gonna be a real key benefactor for implementing this technology that's gonna be a partner around this, develop a taxonomy specific for that group, develop the personalization specific for that group, dev, you know, build up your own capability to work with the technology and partner, and then go out and say, well, who's the next group that we can do this with? It's gonna be easier because we've gotten some experience and we have somebody who can champion this and say, look, they've gotten some benefit of this. So I think you need to use an agile way of rolling this out. And again, Juanita, I talk a lot about that in the white paper, so I hope you'll download it and read it. And, Juanita, you know I'm accessible. So if you have a question about this with me, I've implemented search technologies across, businesses, employee customer experience, and it's something I really love to talk about. Absolutely. We take you up on that offer, so I hope others do too. Finally, we want to welcome you to learn more. If you want more tips and strategies or you wanna learn from our workplace, architects and our workplace SMEs, we have a thirty minute assessment where we'll explore benefits, KPIs, and really trying to break down your goals into something that's achievable as Isaac was alluding to. So, here's a a link for a complimentary thirty minute assessment. We really hope that you found some value in today's session. Isaac and I are really thankful to have you. You can connect with both of us. We've included our emails as well as connect with us on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you what you're working on and what are some of your key challenges. Thank you again, and thank you, Isaac. Thank you.