IoT, Mobility, Cloud Will Dominate Workspaces in 2016
As businesses plan for workplace changes in 2016, five trends seem to be dominating the conversation, according to research conducted by Boston-based software company Planon.
According to Planon’s research, the Internet of Things (IoT), increasing mobility and cloud delivery models, alternate workplaces and Building Information Modeling (BIM) will all significantly shape how employees do their jobs in 2016.
“Many of the trends that will come into focus in 2016 already exist today, but their significance is expected to grow and become mainstream in the near future,” said David Karpook, strategic business consultant at Planon. “Today’s facilities management and real estate managers face an increasing need to respond to the evolution of technology and sustainability, ensure compliance, and increase cost efficiency.”
When it comes to IoT, companies will begin to leverage it to improve their bottom lines. Affordable sensors are now available that can measure the occupancy of a workplace or meeting room minute-by-minute, providing Big Data for analysis with the right software. Employees will find workspaces via screens with availability on the buildings’ floor plan. Additional functionality in apps can help users to check the availability of workspaces by scanning a QR code on a desk or swiping an RFID tag.
Planon said that this will go hand-in-hand with an increasingly mobile culture. Today’s work is being done everywhere – at the office, at home and on the road. The average workplace occupancy rate is dropping and a large portion of the workforce have private commitments that require flexibility. Organizations that recognize the need for mobility are better placed to attract the right talent. And in a mobile reality, cloud provisioning not only simplifies the management of applications and their infrastructure, it also enables significant IT-related cost savings.
Similarly, and for similar reasons, organizations are embracing new ways of working to foster more efficient collaboration, knowledge-sharing, flexibility, speed, innovation and productivity. More than 90% of respondents in Planon’s research agreed that new workplace concepts will improve employee productivity.
And finally, against this backdrop, BIM holds great promise for facilities management and real estate. Applying BIM and BIM methodologies to manage and operate buildings over their life cycle can deliver tangible value and enable efficiencies for facility managers, because they’re not merely producing a model of a building; BIM can provide a platform for real-time collaboration, logistics and quality management.