The 4 Pillars of Modern Workspace Management

A funny thing happened to computing devices over the past decade: They stopped being devices. Or they stopped being just devices, anyway. 

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, many knowledge workers’ entire jobs ran through their laptops. Then, over the past two years, the devices essentially became people’s entire workspaces. Whether employees are at home, in the office or on the road, they now have what they need to join meetings and collaborate on projects with their colleagues. 

With the role of devices changing, organizations must also change the way they deploy, manage and even retire these devices. CDW’s Modern Workspace Management focuses on four pillars that can help organizations develop a strategy across the lifecycle of their device fleets.

We all know the importance of beginning with the end in mind and of carefully planning out inputs to match the results we want. Still, when it comes to computing devices, we often simply purchase a newer version of whatever we’re already using. 

CDW’s experts can help business and IT leaders dig into their employees’ needs, provide valuable persona planning and ultimately help produce a three- to five-year device roadmap.

Device deployment has never been a more complex process than it is today, but there are several services that can help simplify it. CDW and our partners can configure and image end-user devices at scale, ship them directly to employees’ homes and even store purchased devices until an organization needs them. 

This sort of no-touch process is especially important for large-scale deployments. Internal IT shops simply lack the bandwidth to provision hundreds or even thousands of devices on top of their day-to-day responsibilities. And employees who must wait on their devices will quickly grow impatient (and, likely, unproductive). 

The option of storing devices with a third-party partner is often overlooked. With supply chains disrupting device availability, many organizations have been forced to order technology months in advance, sometimes before they’ve even opened office space for the devices to be shipped to.

It’s important to continue to provide employees with device support after they take delivery of their new computers. CDW and our partners can help organizations offload some of these management tasks. 

For instance, external help desk services allow internal IT departments to stay focused on larger, more strategic initiatives that add value to the business. We also offer proactive desktop management, which keeps end-user devices patched and updated over time and can prevent new vulnerabilities from popping up and creating unwanted downtime.

At some point, today’s shiny new device becomes tomorrow’s electronic waste. The time to start thinking about this is when an organization first purchases its devices. In fact, though this is the last stage of the device lifecycle, it’s often where we begin our conversations with customers during a Modern Workspace Management engagement. 

Organizations in the market for new device fleets are often at a loss about what to do with their old ones. We help them prevent a “laptop graveyard” scenario, where supply closets burst with old devices that no one knows what to do with. 

The retirement of devices can bring up questions around security, sustainability and finances. We’re able to help organizations recover any residual value from devices that remain usable, wipe devices of sensitive data and dispose of unusable devices in an environmentally friendly manner. Then, it’s time to start the whole cycle over again.

Story by Amanda Zusman