I finally feel rested and recuperated after a crazy yet wonderful 4 weeks. The Work From Anywhere Conference exceeded our expectations and thankfully most of the attendees felt the same way. We had a terrific time last Wednesday and Thursday with 15 main sessions and many break-out discussions.
If you missed some of the sessions, which was easy given the packed agenda, don’t worry. We are going to make all the sessions available in the next few days.
In the meantime, here’s a roundup of the event.
JP Gownder, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, opened the conference with a keynote on the emergence of Work from Anywhere. I am a huge fan of JP and he delivered. Starting with a fresh analysis of the situation, JP delivered a strategy based around employee experience, called the Bill of Rights for the Employee Experience. I think we can all learn from this.
I then had the pleasure of discussing 1E’s exclusive research findings on the remote employee experience with Kurt De Ruwe, the CIO of Signify and Paul Hardy from the Chief Innovation Office of ServiceNow. Paul and Kurt provided both strategic and practical insights for senior IT leaders. Kurt was really gracious about our Tachyon product and how it is helping Signify implement change faster than before. The research itself is available here.
Sabyasachi Das, Global Service Line Head for Digital Workplace at DXC, discussed the 5 workplace trends beginning to take shape. We had a lot of people discuss the trends in the chat, so Saby certainly got people thinking! I also want to congratulate Saby on his recent promotion — well deserved!
Erik Jost, CTO of Dynamic Workplace for NTT DATA, talked about reducing friction in the employee experience. I am a big fan of Erik’s as he always provides such great insights. This was certainly a great way to look at making the digital world of the remote employee a lot easier to fathom.
We had two industry-specific sessions. Joe Martella, who has worked for Merrill Lynch, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and now Rockefeller Capital Management, provided his insights into the financial services industry and the challenges they face. Always straight talking, it was refreshing to hear Joe discuss how the industry is adapting incredibly quickly. Michael Carson, Head of Unified Endpoint Management at Novartis, talked about how he supports a huge number of employees (over 130,000) and the challenges this brings in a highly regulated industry.
Our very own Jason Keogh, Chief Partner Technologist, provided a masterclass on Tachyon. The technology demonstration got a very large number of people interacting with Jason on use cases and sparked enough questions to last several days!
The day finished with discussing people management with a leading executive coach, Dr. Catherine Sandler. Catherine took questions live from attendees to provide guidance on issues people are facing today with remote work, isolation, and lots of other related topics. We had great participation in this session, and we are likely to run these sessions more often given the number of questions raised, so keep an eye out for more information on that.
Day 2 started with a keynote providing an infrastructure blueprint for the Work from Anywhere Enterprise by Dion Hinchliffe, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Using 1E’s research on the remote employee experience, as well a number of other sources, Dion presented his thesis on the essential elements of a remote-first enterprise. The keynote included many practical elements CIOs can follow, such as digital performance management, to ensure that employees have the best experience possible.
Next was a conversation on how to choose a digital experience monitoring (DEM) solution between Rich Lane, Senior Analyst at Forrester, and our very own Amy Collins, VP of Product Marketing. This was an extremely exciting session as it was the first time Forrester had publicly discussed how they see the DEM space evolving. Rich Lane delved into the key technical considerations when choosing a DEM solution as well as providing context which will be useful to decision makers.
Jason Sandys, Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, provided his view on the state of the art on supporting the work from anywhere enterprise. Our very own Shaun Cassells, a Microsoft MVP, and Paul Thomsen, Product Manager for 1E Windows Self-Service, demonstrated how 1E supports Microsoft’s Modern Management solutions. Paul also unveiled 1E’s latest enterprise application portal, demonstrating a single employee interface for ServiceNow, Microsoft Intune, SCCM and self-help through Tachyon.
Wipro's Ramesh Ananthakrishnan, Practice Development Head of LiVE Workspace, shared his learnings since covid and how Wipro are thinking about future workplace strategies that ensure employees can work while IT are not overloaded with manual tasks and remain cost effective. Ramesh provided examples of how Tachyon is helping their customers secure endpoints while reducing costs.
Adam Haylock, Senior Solutions Consultant for EMEA Partners at ServiceNow, and 1E’s Mike Todd, Partner Solutions Consultant, discussed the need for service desk automation. Mike demonstrated 1E’s powerful diagnostics and remediation capabilities from within the ServiceNow console so level 1 technicians can resolve 40% more issues on first call to massively improve employee satisfaction while reducing IT costs.
For me, one of the key highlights in a day of amazing sessions was listening to EMA’s Managing Research Director, Steve Brasen, compare the digital experience monitoring tools available in the market. Steve has the deepest domain knowledge of the endpoint space and used this to compare the strengths and weaknesses of 1E’s Tachyon, Nexthink, Aternity and Lakeside’s Systrack. Steve provided a comprehensive market overview. It’s quite possibly the only comparison available so definitely worth a watch.
The final session was from 1E’s Product team, headed by Rob Peterscheck, showing us all how 1E’s Tachyon can support the work from anywhere enterprise. The whole team provided concrete examples of how 1E solutions improve the employee experience and provide deep integrations into ServiceNow, Microsoft Teams and 1E technologies. Rob’s team demonstrated how 1E’s solution empower IT to resolve performance and experience issues for remote employees and provide a self-service IT experience, among many other capabilities.
All sessions are now available to watch on-demand.