Benefits of Digital Workplace and Collaboration

The Digital Workplace brings a digital working experience to the employees of the organization. The digital environment can give the employees all the data needed by them comfortably for the working purposes (Köffer, 2015). The data can be shared in the digital workplace very quickly among the other employees to help them or it can be used to take help from other employees. Collaboration and integration must be integrated to form a digital workplace. The digital workplace has its benefits. Smoothly flowing information in the digital workplace has some significant positive impact on the employees of the digital environment which are increased flexibility, innovative energy in the employees and improved morale of the employees (Colbert, Yee & George 2016). In this literature essay how the knowledge management can help to develop the existing knowledge and skills for a better future of the digital workplace will be discussed. Further, this essay will investigate burgeoning issues in the aspect of the future of knowledge management.

The digital workplace defines the concept that how the new technologies can create a virtual workplace same as the physical workplace which can help the businesses to rethink their business processes and can help to increase the efficiency (Goswami et al., 2014). The common goal of a digital workplace is to enhance the collaboration among the employees, improved communication and business content management. A significant benefit of the digital workplace is that it is available every time wherever needed by any individuals as this workplace uses a cloud based structure (Simmhan et al., 2013). The main feature of a digital workplace is that it is a paperless office and the primary target of these type offices is to replace the paper related processes with the digital workflow. The digital workplace can benefit the organization by giving the business intelligence report, which can be used in data visualization and for the analytics report. This data visualization can help the organization to measure operation effectiveness and can predict the condition of the future market (Ward, Grinstein & Keim, 2015). Though the digital workplace is a total technology dependant initiative, it also requires some business planning to implement the digital workplace correctly. For this, a vast knowledge of managerial skills can help to secure the future of the digital workplace.

When concerned about the knowledge management, the managers express their concerns over the managerial, information, and cultural issue (Dalkir, 2013). Here the culture defines how the managers of the organization concern about the internal changes in the management of the organization. The managers are concerned about the cultural issues because their main aim is to convince peoples to help the organization with their knowledge and also to convince the other businesses to share their market knowledge with the other businesses. The management is concerned about the value of the business of the knowledge management and which metric is needed to express the desired value (Xie, Zhang & Zhang, 2014). This was a bit confusing to select who would be competent in dealing with the knowledge management related issues. Above this, several peoples involved themselves in developing the knowledge management which includes the technical staffs, archivists, documentation staffs and the professionals with the development knowledge. This concern also discusses how to implement the knowledge management in the digital workplace.

Issues in Knowledge Management and Digital Workplace

Considering the digital workplace some issues that can arise regarding the knowledge management are the lack of trust among the individuals, lack of the incentives structure that can increase the motivation of an employee, organizational culture, lack of diversity and openness, heavy workload and lack of proper technology to implement the digital workplace (Alegre, Sengupta & Lapiedra, 2013).

The digital workplace can face various type of problems which are IT conflict, streamlining document management, empowerment of remote and the mobile users and identify management simplifying. In IT conflict situation employees of the organization breaks the collaboration among them and stand against the organization. This type of situation mainly arises because of the constant pressure from the organization to implement new technologies quickly. In streamlining document management system, the organization uses the robust document management system that can be used for eliminating the duplication error and also it makes everything easy to find within the organization (Kletsiou & Astin, 2015). In typical cases, the employees waste time when searching for a particular file while a track record of the files can help to find the relevant tasks. Without the streamlining document management system, the digital workplace will face a massive issue regarding the time management. The remote administrators are one of the most valuable people in the organization and they can approve the schedule, applications, forms from anywhere with the proper internet connection (Steenstra et al., 2015). Without the appropriate infrastructure, the remote administrator will unable to do the adequate work for the organization and this issue can lead the digital workplace to a vast problem. The identity management needed to be simplified in the digital workplace to serve the employees better. Without the simple identity management system, there can be many complex issues regarding the logging which can arise in the digital workplace as most of the user prefers a simplified login identity with high security which can be accessed from any device.

The knowledge management is a process which is used for sharing, creating, using and managing knowledge of an organization. The knowledge management includes a specific type of courses which is used in the field of the information system, business administration and in the information sciences. In the segment of business administration, the knowledge management is now widely used in the digital workplace as the knowledge management system can lead the digital workplace to a better future. Many large companies are using the internal dedicated knowledge management system to give support the human resource management system and to implement business strategies properly.

The knowledge management system can be categorized into a various part in the field of the digital workplace. First category is the Groupware which is a type of software facility which collaborates and shares the organizational information. This tool can be used for document sharing and threaded discussions (Bravo, Duque & Gallardo, 2013).

The second category of the knowledge management system is the Workflow System. The workflow system is a type of system which permits the representation of the processes which is associated with creation, maintenance and use of the organizational knowledge (Jain et al., 2015). This workflow system is used for creating and utilizing the documents and forms.

Categories of Knowledge Management System in Digital Workplace

The document management and content management system is another type of knowledge management system in the digital workplace. In the document management and content management, a specific kind of software is used which can automatically process the creation of web content and document (Savage, 2013). The working criteria of this software can be compared with the graphics designers, editors and writers. The commercial vendors of the knowledge management system can support the digital workplaces by providing the Documentum and Interwoven services.

Enterprise portals can help the digital workplaces by providing the software services which can be used for broadcasting the information in the entire workplace, or it can transmit the message in a specific group in the digital workplace (Zhang & O’Halloran, 2013).

eLearning is another category of the knowledge management system which is used by the digital workplace to create customized education and training (Verbert et al., 2013). This type of eLearning plans includes online classes, monitoring progress and lesson plans.

Scheduling and planning the software is another category of the knowledge management system. This type of knowledge management software automatically creates the schedule of the maintenance. This mainly used in project management of the digital workplace.

In the digital workplace, virtual face to face meeting is a vital way of communication. This is also considered as video conferencing which is another important category of the knowledge management system (Denstadli et al., 2013).

The above-discussed categories of the knowledge management system can help to overcome the potential issues related to the digital workplace. From the above discussion, part it is also cleared that the knowledge management is very much required for the future growth of the digital workplace. However, it has been also founded that the digital workplace has some significant flaws in it. Implementing various type of knowledge management system can help the business or the organization to overcome the issues related to the digital workplace.

According to Mousavizadeh et al., 2015 the knowledge management system does not affect the digital workplace regarding serving a better future. In this study, the author has shown that the knowledge management system has no connection to the digital workplace as the knowledge management system has some adverse effects on the implementation of the knowledge management process. . In this article, certain types of knowledge management barriers have been discussed considering the IT software tools and the incentive structure. The IT software tools are required for knowledge sharing, and the absence of incentive structure creates discouragement among the employees.

Analysis of the above article and form this discussion part it can be stated that knowledge management has some own barriers to it, but still it has some significant positive impacts on the digital workplace. The knowledge management system has a substantial effect on the digital workplace as this can help to build the required skills for the future of the digital workplace.

References:

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