The modern workplace is evolving rapidly, and with the growing importance of digital technologies, organizations are realizing the need to adapt to a digital-first approach. One of the ways to achieve this is by implementing a digital workplace portal, a centralized platform that offers employees access to all the tools, resources, and information they need to perform their jobs efficiently.

By implementing a digital workplace portal, organizations can provide their employees with a modern, efficient, and engaging experience that enhances their productivity, satisfaction, and overall work experience. Here are some ways in which digital workplace portals such as BMC Helix Digital Workplace can modernize the employee experience:

1. Help employees get their job done

   Digital workplace portals provide a tailored portal experience that drives self-service and automation for the enterprise. This enables employees to easily find the tools and resources they need to get their job done more conveniently, intuitively, and effectively. For example, virtual agents that offer support for IT and can offer live chat support, and an integrated knowledge experience allows employees to quickly find the information they need.

2. Enable hybrid work

   Remote work has become more common, and hybrid workplaces are the new norm. A digital workplace portal enables employees to work from anywhere, at any time, on any device. This allows employees to access information and resources whenever they need them and collaborate with team members irrespective of their location. The portal can also provide management tools to support the hybrid workforce.

3. Automate workflows

   Automated workflows can be integrated into a digital workplace portal, allowing employees to complete tasks more efficiently. For example, an employee could request time off through the portal, and the request could automatically be sent to their manager for approval. This streamlines processes and saves time for both employees and managers. The portal can also provide things like advanced knowledge management support, real-time language translation, and automated triage of inbound email via a machine learning algorithm.

4. Enable a collaborative enterprise

   A digital workplace portal can enable collaboration across teams and departments. Take new employee onboarding for example. It’s imperative the employee has a good experience and is set up for success. This requires collaboration across teams: IT to ensure that the new employee receives their login information and equipment on time; facilities to provide building access; finance to setup payroll as well as tax and retirement deductions; and HR to ensure the employee is enrolled in healthcare coverage. The portal allows for the different departments to effectively collaborate in supporting with the new employee by providing them with key information they will need, actions that must be taken during their first few weeks, and the ability to answer questions they may have.

   

   Figure1. Employee Onboarding Portal

5. Deliver an amazing employee experience

   By offering a modern and intuitive interface, digital workplace portals can enhance the employee experience. Employees can easily find the tools and resources they need, and personalized dashboards and notifications can make their workday more efficient and engaging. This can lead to increased employee satisfaction and motivation. The portal can also offer cognitive search capabilities that enable employees to find the information quickly and easily.

   With a digital workplace portal, employees can access all the information and resources they need to perform their jobs effectively. This includes access to company policies, training materials, project files, and more, all from a single platform. This streamlines the process of finding information, saving employees time and effort.

   Digital workplace portals can be customized to meet the unique needs of individual employees. This includes personalized dashboards, notifications, and access to tools and resources based on their role and preferences. This level of personalization enhances the employee experience by providing them with a platform that is tailored to their specific needs.

   

   Figure2. Healthcare Industry Portal

6. Improved efficiency for industry verticals

   BMC Helix offers lines-of-business modules for HR, Customer Service, and Workplace Service, there are also templates available that cater to specific industry verticals. These templates provide organizations with pre-built solutions that are tailored to the specific needs and requirements of their industry. These out-of-the-box templates can help organizations get up and running quickly and efficiently and provide a solid foundation for customizations and further enhancements.

Some examples of out-of-the-box templates for industry verticals include:

• Healthcare Industry Template: Patient management, appointment scheduling, telemedicine, and more.
• Finance Industry Template: Loan management, account opening, payment processing, and more.
• Retail Industry Template: Inventory management, order processing, customer management, and more.

In addition to the efficiencies they offer, these templates can also help organizations stay ahead of the curve by providing access to the latest technology and best practices in their industry.

Figure3. Finance Industry Portal

In conclusion, digital workplace portals are an essential tool for modernizing the employee experience. By helping employees get their job done more conveniently, intuitively, and effectively in a delightful way—enabling hybrid work, automating workflows, enabling collaboration across teams, and creating an amazing employee experience—digital workplace portals can help organizations create a modern, efficient, and engaging workplace that enhances employee productivity, satisfaction, and overall work experience.

Telecommunications companies are poised at a critical moment of transformation. As demand for their services soars, they face both tremendous opportunities for growth and key challenges in maintaining consistently high-quality service and customer satisfaction. Now more than ever, they must leverage data effectively to make optimal business and operational decisions; respond effectively to customer needs; and achieve greater efficiency and productivity. In this new era of telecommunications, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are quickly becoming mission-critical capabilities.

A changing world calls for new telecommunications technologies

Always integral to the infrastructure of modern life, telecom companies have taken on heightened importance during the COVID-19 pandemic, becoming the backbone of the fight against economic and social paralysis. As businesses, schools, and much of day-to-day life shifted online, an unprecedented demand for voice and data communications—especially uninterrupted wireless and internet connectivity—followed. In response, telecom operators rapidly extended their network capacity to support remote work, virtual classrooms, online entertainment, and other connected activities.

The trends accelerated by the pandemic will only continue after it has passed. Both businesses and consumers have become accustomed to doing more things virtually and companies will increasingly focus on engaging with customers through online channels. Large numbers of employees will also choose to continue working remotely for the long term—a model that can simultaneously reduce employer costs. In this light, many telecom providers are treating the COVID-19 pandemic not as a passing crisis to be addressed through provisional measures, but as a forcing function to accelerate their own digital transformation so they can survive and prosper in the new normal.

BMC Software’s research suggests that AI/ML can play a valuable central role in the transformation of telecommunications, helping providers deliver superior performance in both the short and long term. Armed with automated insights and intelligence, “Communication Service Providers (Telecom Providers)” will be better able to cope with fluctuating demand levels, adjust to supply chain disruptions, and adapt to sharp shifts in consumer confidence and priorities.

Leveraging the benefits of AI/ML will require obtaining the support of employees—whose anxiety is mounting about the combined impact of the pandemic, economic slowdown, and technological change on their careers and lives. With this frame of mind, employees can easily see AI/ML and automation as a threat to their livelihood. In our experience, when operators elicit employee buy-in as part of the AI/ML deployment process, they come to understand AI is a productivity tool rather than a reason to worry about losing their jobs.

While many telecom companies have already started using AI /ML technologies, only those that harness the full potential of these tools will truly thrive. At BMC, we believe technology is most powerful when it empowers businesses and users. People, process, and technology must go hand-in-hand to transform enterprises and telcos. This is especially true when it comes to leveraging AI/ML innovation across the enterprise. In order to maximize the strategic value of AI/ML, it’s imperative that all business domains and cross-functional users can access and use an end-to-end platform for data exploration, feature engineering, model training, and inferencing.

Democratizing AI to enable broader business transformation

In the past few years, AI/ML has become a mainstream technology that turns data into information and intelligence. With rich, virtually unlimited data resources at hand, the telecom industry is in an especially strong position to benefit from this capability. Big data stores are easily accessible to operators, while advanced algorithms and automated ML (AutoML) tools are available through open-source packages and public cloud services.

Only one obstacle stands in the way: the shortage of highly skilled data scientists to address a wide range of business demands. To overcome this hurdle, telcos and other enterprises need to democratize AI, lower barriers to entry for its use, and make AI available to the larger user community, who can use it to meet their own needs for data-driven intelligence.

Empowered with their own AI/ML capabilities, users across the organization can become vastly more effective, predictive, and proactive in their work.

• Finance business analysts can create models to adjust pricing strategies based on customer sentiment to increase revenue.
• Customer success developers can build models to predict potential customer complaints and route incoming customer calls to the most appropriate channel to increase customer satisfaction.
• Site reliability engineers (SREs) can train models to predict potential capacity or network issues and proactively correct problems before they disrupt service.

Figure 1: AI/ML use cases in telecom business domains

Taken as a whole, the collective value of use cases like these across the company can make a significant difference for a telecom provider’s bottom line, market position, and growth. More broadly, companies can create a culture where everyone can innovate; every decision is AI-driven; and transformation is woven throughout daily operations.

An AI/ML platform built for broad-based transformation

The AI/ML platform built into BMC Helix allows users to develop, deploy, and maintain ML and deep learning models over time. The platform is delivered as a set of managed services that work holistically and cohesively to enable a reliable, scalable, secure, and self-service experience that meets both business and information security requirements. As shown below, the platform is built by customizing and integrating homegrown, open-source, and vendor tools and cloud services in a hybrid cloud environment.

Figure 2: AI/ML platform

A self-service console simplifies day-to-day work based on each user’s goals. To foster innovation across the business and reduce AI time-to-market across all business domains, the platform also makes it easy for members of the community to discover and share ML assets like data, features, and models. The BMC Helix Platform supports a number of personas, providing each with a custom experience.

Figure 3: BMC Helix personas for DevOps, SRE, and AI/ML

Standardizing the ML development lifecycle to increase AI/ML agility

Although creating, testing, and executing ML models is very different from writing software code, the concept of a development lifecycle and the need for continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) rigor are no different. In fact, they may be even more stringent due to the need for reproducibility and the repetitive, experimentation-based nature of ML.

The BMC Helix platform hides these underlying complexities with a self-service portal that makes it as easy for a data scientist or developer to release their model as it is for a software engineer to release code. The goal is to simplify and streamline the end-to-end ML workflow through data analysis and model development to productization.

BMC Helix benefits

The AI/ML platform also offers extensive benefits for telecom providers, including:

• Increased productivity of all platform users
• Reduced time-to-market of AI/ML solutions
• Intelligent business decisions empowered by ML models
• Continuous value delivery and innovation at scale
• Lowered total cost of ownership (TCO)

By democratizing and integrating AI/ML into workflows and product development, the platform helps reduce barriers to critical data and algorithms, fostering innovation, important insights, and significant gains for the operator—and the business.

At a pivotal moment for telecommunications industry growth and transformation, AI/ML has tremendous potential to help telcos meet current challenges and drive key strategic and financial goals for the long term. By accelerating their AI evolution, telecom companies can emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic stronger than ever, powered by AI/ML at scale for a new era of success.