Introduction

In Reimagining Collaboration, I argue that Covid-19 is accelerating a fundamental shift in the workplace. Specifically, organizations are doing two things:

• Increasingly integrating disparate workplace applications
• Adopting the Hub-Spoke Model of Collaboration

The consequences of these trends are nothing short of profound. For starters, say goodbye to incessant multitasking. Ditto for data silos. Departments can redefine and simply core business processes. Automation means less manual work. What’s more, we’ll see better analytics and machine learning.

On a more practical level, the collaboration wares of Salesforce/Slack, Google, Zoom, and other software vendors are all converging.

Oh, and let’s not forget Microsoft. Today’s Viva announcement represents its audacious attempt to integrate, well, just about every workplace app for every type of employee into one mega-app. In its parlance, an employee experience platform.

From a piece in The Wall Street Journal:

On Thursday, the company unveiled its first set of apps for a new suite of employee management tools, called Viva. The package is designed to offer—in one place—software for human resource functions like payroll, management tools to track employee performance and resources for staff covering benefits, career development and other aspects of their life at work.

All. In. One. Place.

Simon Says: The days of disconnected enterprise tech are coming to an end.

I’m no spring chicken. Viva represents to date the most ambitious attempt of any software vendor to bundle together so many disparate offerings. It would be easier for me to explain what this Swiss Army knife does not purport to do. As far as I can tell, there’s integration with Microsoft FrontPage and Paint. (Yes, that’s an attempted joke.)

Say what you will about Viva, but Microsoft is clearly not lacking ambition. I for one will be interested in Viva’s successes and inevitable failures over the coming years. Of this much, however, I am sure: The days of disparate enteprise tech and data silos are coming to an end.

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What say you?