White Paper

Enable Workplace Transformation withIntelligent Digital Workspaces
Sponsored by: Lenovo
Phil Hochmuth
April 2023

IDC OPINION
The enterprise corporate workplace has undergone rapid and permanent change over the past several
years, as widespread adoption of remote work and quick implementation of hybrid work structures
have become the norm for most businesses. As the workplace undergoes this radical transformation,
employees have also reimagined and reinvented their personal workspaces — the digital devices,apps, and tools workers use to do their daily jobs.
According to IDC's 2022 Future of Work Survey, all 1,316 respondents worldwide — 100% — said theirorganization has adopted, or plans to adopt, a hybrid work model. Among these firms, nearly half(46%) of enterprises worldwide describe their company's hybrid model as "flexible" or "very flexible"
where employees can work freely between home and onsite offices.
However, big questions around how employees will interact, collaborate, and be productive in these
new environments is still up in the air. While tools for remote collaboration have been available for
decades, they've never been used at the scale seen in the past several years. Technology initiallymeant for a small subset of "remote" workers suddenly became the norm, a primary way employeesinteracted, shared information and, in general, worked together. Many such technologies in the market
became synonymous with this new way of working. To that end, videoconferencing, cloud productivity
suites, and content sharing and collaboration tools are areas of increased planned spend for morethan 45% of enterprises worldwide and represent top 3 categories of technology investment, according
to IDC's 2022 Future of Work Survey.
While many businesses accelerated the use of these technologies quickly and have come a long way
in supporting hybrid, even now, more than half of organizations are still categorizing themselves, atbest, as "moderately" ready for broad work transformation. Many organizations were forced toaccelerate digital transformation efforts just to enable hybrid/remote workers but did so without a longterm sustaining strategy for supporting this environment for the long run.
With this new environment in place for most organizations, security has emerged as a top concern for
IT professionals. In many cases, IT teams are being asked to open and unlock corporate resources,
such as devices, internal apps and data, and other IT services, ahead of internal readiness for thesetechnologies to be exposed and accessed remotely. Some firms have undergone rapid reimagining of
their internal IT infrastructure and security architectures, while others have struggled to try and fit the
new way of remote/hybrid work into existing, legacy infrastructures — with varying degrees of success.

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One result of the expanded workspace environments of remote/hybrid users is the increased numberof devices, device types, and operating systems (OSs) used in a worker's personal workspaceenvironment. While Windows PCs are still the workhorse of enterprise digital work, more than 50% of
enterprises say that other endpoint device types — ranging from Macs to Android and Apple
smartphones and tablets are just as critical to end-user productivity and overall enterprise productivity.
However, among these device types less than 50% (and in some cases more than two-thirds) of suchdevices are not managed by any corporate endpoint management software platform. This makes
many end users' digital workspaces an open, broad multidevice/multi-OS attack surface.
According to IDC's December 2022 Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending (FERS) Survey, Wave
11, the top 3 business priorities of enterprise CIOs are operational efficiency, customer satisfaction,and employee productivity (with more than a third of respondents citing these areas as top 3).
Businesses have undergone a lot of change, pain, and revamping of infrastructure to reach thesegoals. However, the ability sustaining support for operational efficiency, enabling workers to delightcustomers, and driving more end-user productivity growth is a challenge that CIOs will continue tostruggle with, unless there is a fundamental shift and rethinking in how IT can deliver and support suchenvironments.

SITUATION OVERVIEWThe Intelligent Digital Workspace
An intelligent digital workspace (IDW) is an ecosystem of technologies that secures, personalizes, andinterconnects the resources that employees need to be productive. This includes tools forcollaborators, business software and apps, and critical databases and other data sources. IDW
architectures allow for the access of all these IT resources from any location and on any device. IDW
environments are also fully observable from an analytics and reporting perspective and provide IT
teams with means to automate a wide range of end-user support, enablement, and security
remediation tasks and workflows.
There are three fundamental product categories or "layers" to the intelligent digital workspace. Whileeach layer of the IDW is in its own right a critical digital business tool for enterprises, it's the
deployment of these three layers in concert, and in the context of the IDW frameworks, which
differentiates businesses trying to play catch-up with digital and workforce transformation toorganizations thriving as a result of a more agile, connected, and secure workforce.

Workspace Devices
Physical devices are a critical component to an individual employee's workspace, and the larger
workplace in general. This layer includes devices such as PCs and laptops as well as smartphones
and tablets and office-based peripherals (multifunction printers, desk phones, conferencing equipment,
kiosks, point-of-sale devices, and ruggedized computing endpoints).
How devices are deployed relies heavily on use cases and industry scenarios (Windows PCs, Macs,
and Linux desktop/laptops all have varying roles and levels of preference among employee types,
ranging from knowledge workers, creatives, developers, and frontline staff). Ruggedized or low-cost
Android tablets may suffice in back-office or transactional workspace roles, while for some firms withcustomer-facing retail or banking services scenarios, only the latest iPad will do. Physical devices and"things" in the digital workspace certainly go beyond PCs, desktop phones, laptops, smartphones, andtablets. Conferencing equipment, large-scale computing devices with touch interfaces, and smart©2023 IDC

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digital assistants will also be part of a connected, digital workspace — or "workspace IoT" —environment. Collectively, these individual technology deployment environments comprise the larger
digital "workplace" environment. PCs, mobile devices, and collaboration/communication devices andendpoints are the primary components of these workplace environments today. In the near future (andalready deployed among some forward-thinking businesses), augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR)
and other connected, immersive wearable technologies will become integral part of enterpriseworkspaces and workplaces.
Devices are sometimes overlooked as commoditized technologies, but it is critical for businesses toensure not only that workers have endpoints that are needed to do a specific job but that they also
enjoy using their devices on a daily basis. Intelligent digital workspaces must accommodate all these
options while extending security, management, and control capabilities across a diverse set of
endpoints. According to IDC's 2023 Endpoint Management Survey, more than 90% of organizations
now allow for some level of BYOD or personal device usage for work. End users are making choices
as to what kinds of devices work best for them and putting the onus on IT and security teams tointegrate these endpoints into a larger enterprise architecture. The IDW framework is a critical means
to that end. This includes rebuilding access technologies for BYOD-centric users with technologies
such as secure accesses service edge (SASE) and app-level VPN technology deployments.
At the same time, devices are proliferating in new use cases where endpoints such as smartphones
and tablets or connected devices with embedded technology such as Android OS or IoT systems, suchas Linux or Raspberry Pi, are acting as single-use or task-specific devices (such as tablets used tobook conference rooms, or connected HVAC control systems, or digital signage/kiosks). Management
and security of these deployment scenarios is as important as end-user computing
management/security (if not more so) since deployment of these IoT workspace technologies cansignificantly increase an organization's digital attack surface and open up firms to escalating attack
scenarios. Single-purpose devices, such as tablets or smartphones used as barcode scanners, orother data capture/input devices, can also be sources of data leaks and compliance violations,especially if such tools are used by multiple employees across work shifts and in multiple locations.

Workspace Apps and Experiences
Some workers might say they "live" in a certain application, software suite, or digital tool as part of their
day-to-day job. This is where the digital experiences layer of the digital workspace operates. This layer
unifies people, data, content, communities, and context to personalize and proactively surface thetechnological solutions that workers need to do their jobs. In recent years, line-of-business (LOB)
leaders acquired these solutions to streamline their work, often circumventing existing processes in thename of productivity.
Collaboration and easy access to data and applications are key attributes of the digital experiences
layer. Having this layer well integrated with the devices and infrastructure software layers allows digital
experiences, data, apps, and other resources to be delivered to any device on any network or
deployment scenario.
Deploying and integrating business applications, software, and SaaS resources through the IDW
framework can remove barriers to employee speed and efficiency. In the IDW framework, software cangenerate proactive recommendations about the next best action and present the resources required tocomplete that action. This creates a consistent work environment in terms of data and app
experiences, which can then be used to drive knowledge-powered solutions at the group, team,division level, or enterprisewide. As workers become more physically apart and their digital resources©2023 IDC

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3increasingly more far-flung, tying together this level of digital engagement with IDW becomes evenmore critical. Along these lines, many enterprises are starting to address employee well-being andmental health with technology solutions. More than 40% of enterprise respondents in IDC's 2022
Future of Work Survey said they were implementing employee wellness programs with digitaltechnologies over the next 18 months.

Workspace InfrastructureThis is the technology that ties together the device and apps/experiences layer of the IDW. Suchplatforms are the glue that keep together all aspects of the IDW into a unified experience. On afunctional level, this includes tools that provide initial and ongoing provisioning, management, access
control, security, monitoring, and support for hardware and software deployed in end-user
environments.
Some software categories of these tools include endpoint device management, IT service
management, virtual client computing, IT asset management, identity and access management, andendpoint security software technologies. AI- and ML-driven technologies such as advanced analytics,
API management, and intra-app and platform connectors are also emerging in this category.
As vendors of digital workspace infrastructure consolidate, users will have broader visibility of data on
end-user device configurations, compliance states, and software/apps inventories deployed in theenterprise. This is a big data source that, through AI, can be used to automate tasks such as software
deployment and discovery, security monitoring of end users' systems, and other management tasks
that are part of basic client endpoint management platform functionality. This automation can help
users of the technology more efficiently manage and secure large fleets of devices across a wide
range of form factors while supporting complex policies, rules, and configuration models. The ability tovirtually deliver apps and even entire desktop experiences — often called workspaces in the industry —is another key capability in the digital workspace infrastructure layer.

Where the Layers Interact
Coordinating and organizing the three layers is an ongoing act of design focused on balancing
productivity and behavioral enablement. Among a range of anticipated changes and challenges,
enterprises worldwide cite this hybrid new work model as a factor that will permanently change their IT
operations. As employees move toward hybrid work, intelligent digital workspace technologies will help
bridge the gap between physical and digital environments as well.
Resource entitlement/assignment starts with onboarding, continues throughout the employee
experience, and may well extend beyond formal completion of the work arrangement for an indefinite
period. This entitlement must be dynamic instead of statically assigned to a specific position. These
entitlements may include devices, interface configurations, and security arrangements/software within
the infrastructure stack to enable critical process steps or behaviors. Examples include the suite ofassignments, entitlements, and forms required to initiate employment; the management of information
exposed in the interface based on geospatial and social (e.g., presence of teammates) location; andthe management of retirement benefits after employment is complete.
With endpoint devices being such a critical component of the digital workspace, it's not a surprise thatmany enterprises would look to device OEMs as a top trusted partner for deploying critical workspacetechnologies, such as endpoint configuration, security, access management, and compliance.
According to IDC's 2023 Endpoint Management Survey, more enterprise CIOs cited device©2023 IDC

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4manufacturers/OEMs as their primary suppliers of unified endpoint management solutions (42%)
compared with other technology supplier sources, such as software vendors, telcos or system
integrators, and VARs. This strong connection between device supplier and the supporting workspace
management and security technologies indicates that buyers of end-user computing technology see
the role of device makers as not only going beyond just supporting hardware but also enabling theentire end-user computing experience, including security, management, and application provisioning.
This strong affinity toward endpoint devices and OEMs as key infrastructure partners makes sense.
According to IDC's 2023 Future Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, Wave 11, notebooks and
PCs are still hot areas of investment and spending for enterprises. Worldwide, just under 50% of
enterprises said they planned to increase spend on technology categories such as notebooks,
smartphones, and tablets in 2023 compared with the previous year (even as a troubled economy andpossible recession loom). This shows how much organizations rely on having a digitally enabled
workforce and the strong association that businesses make between digital productivity and advanced
endpoint devices.

System Infrastructure Focus: Unified Endpoint Management
Unified endpoint management (UEM) combines into a single software platform the management andprovisioning functions for most common end-user computing operating systems and device types(e.g., Windows, macOS, iOS/iPadOS, Android, and Chrome OS, as well as Linux). By definition, UEM
products must be able to manage both mobile and PC endpoints; this excludes legacy platforms suchas PC life-cycle management, PC imaging solutions, and mobile device management.
Devices — laptops, PCs, smartphones, tablets, and wearables — are where the rubber meets the roadfor many enterprises' digital transformation projects. The introduction of new endpoint devices anddevice types into enterprise use cases and workflows requires centralized, or unified, management,
monitoring, and configuration functions. This can ensure that endpoints are functionally optimized andproperly configured, secured, and compliant from operating system as well as app and data
standpoint.
Receiving a new corporate device — whether a PC, mobile device, or specialty endpoint — is often thefirst experience new employees have with an IT organization or the organization overall. Businesses
have for a while tried to make onboarding experiences seamless and even consumer-like. This
includes automated provisioning and updating of end-user environments, allowing new workers to start
being productive immediately on the job. Organizations that are already oriented toward cloud-based
system infrastructure, software, and business apps are in a better position to enable this type of
scenario. However, organizations with strong UEM capabilities, especially cloud or hybrid deploymentof the technology, will be in a better position to successfully take advantage of endpoint analytics.

Device as a Service — Enabling Intelligent Digital Workspace Infrastructure
Devices as a service (DaaS) combines hardware, on-device software, and life-cycle services into one
as-a-service product with a consistent, recurring price. Users of DaaS generally see benefits in termsof cost savings as well as the ability to offload and shift IT department resources away from client
endpoint device management, one of the more manual, labor-intensive resources roles in any IT
group. Working with a DaaS provider integrates these functions into a company's broader IT
operations without burdening or overextending human and technical resources. In addition, workers(the ones using the devices) also benefit from the DaaS model, as they receive devices that are more

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suited for their role and task, as well as receiving shorter device upgrade cycles; so workers arealways taking advantage of the latest technology and features from hardware OEMs.
There are some migration challenges associated with DaaS adoption. Many organizations might still
have long-term service contracts on existing device fleets or are sourcing multiple device types fromvarious sources (e.g., PCs from one provider, mobile devices from a cellular carrier). There is also alearning curve and ramp-up time for retraining and redistributing IT labor to other areas because of
DaaS adoption. However, many organizations do see this as the future of the endpoint IT operations
strategies. According to IDC's 2022 Future of Enterprise Resiliency and Spending Survey, 45% ofenterprises said they saw "workspace as a service" offerings as being one of the enduring technology
adoption areas that will last long beyond the COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 time frames.

Benefits of Intelligent Digital Workspaces
A characteristic of the modern work environment, or workspace, is the enormous amount of data
generated by the interaction of devices, interfaces, and infrastructure. This data is a problem for someorganizations because it forces context switching, which kills productivity. And it's a problem for thefoundation of the agile workspace with its focus on detecting, contextualizing, organizing, andexecuting work as it occurs.
The primary differentiator of the intelligent digital workspace is intelligence. Intelligence is what
personalizes the workspace for end users and provides the specific resources that a worker needs forthe task at hand. An example of this may include an application deployment, dashboarding, or app
launching aggregation tool, which knows the group, role, and digital needs of an individual worker andpopulates or provides only the necessary apps and tools automatically. Another example could be aworkflow management technology that anticipates the next digital step or requirement for a worker in agiven workflow or task and surfaces just the right app, piece of digital content, or access rights to theuser seamlessly. This view of the intelligent digital workspace has not yet been fully realized, butinnovative technology vendors and service providers are rapidly making progress, effectively turning
the traditional means of technology delivery on its head.
Unlike work structures created in the mid-20th century, the intelligent digital workspace responds towork as it emerges from modern businesses' chaotic mix of data, people, processes, and partners, andit meets the demand for millisecond decision making. It creates a consistent context, maintains a flowof work, and organizes action by a combination of digital and human workers entitled to an array ofdata, digital, physical, intellectual, and workflow assets. While some organizations chose agility andwere better able to navigate the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, other firms suffered fromcompulsory, unplanned agility forced upon their workers and teams. Going into 2023, the majority of
U.S. enterprises plan to increase spending on digital workspace technology to support new models of
remote/hybrid work and address new demands and security challenges brought on by a distributed,
dynamic, and borderless enterprise.
AI-enabled orchestration overlays onto the intelligent digital workspace. The worker is at the center ofthe intelligent digital workspace paradigm. Universal device access is the initial interface to a digital
layer of applications, tasks, data, and work groups and communities. These interfaces, experiences,
underlying data, and business IP are bound by the third layer — workspace infrastructure, which
provisions and provides the guardrails, boundaries, and security tethers of the overall workspace
based on business policies, compliance mandates, and other controls and requirements. AI, ML, andanalytics technologies can proactively recommend the next best action and provide access to theresources required to complete that action.

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From a pre-deployment scenario, analytics can be critical for helping suggest a better match oftechnology (endpoint devices), as well as key apps and software packages to employees based on
their personas, roles, and skill sets. The deployment of AI and ML can also be used to proactively
identify and self-heal issues on deployed endpoints before they turn into costly service desk issues.

CHALLENGES/OPPORTUNITIES▪

Incumbent tech: Organizations have many tools and platforms to manage endpoint devices aswell as to deliver software, provision environments, and create workspace experiences for end
users. Many of these platforms are well entrenched and have a long tail in terms of their usage
and legacy impact on an organization. Providers of IDW platforms should continue to offer
capabilities to help customers support multiple types of environments and functions asorganizations continue their migration to IDW frameworks.

▪

Security turf lines: The line between management and security of endpoint devices continues
to blur and bend as functionality of modern devices more tightly integrates these functions.
Keep security buyers, or multi-hat-wearing IT decision makers (i.e., teams managing bothsecurity and management products) in mind in terms of product messaging and demonstrationof broader value.

▪

Expanded digital footprint/attack surfaces: As enterprises deploy more connected devices into
employees' digital workspaces, and into the larger digital workplace overall, the risks grow for
digital breaches, network intrusions, and other hacking-related activities. As more devices
appear in employees' immediate digital workspaces — use of multiple PCs, mobile devices,tablets, connected endpoints, and so forth — there is more opportunity for hackers to infiltrate abusiness network by taking advantage of latent, undetected vulnerabilities inside device
operating system software, or among applications and software programs running on devices.
Also, the more physical devices become connected and "intelligent" in the digital workplace(e.g., IoT devices controlling HVAC, lighting, physical access) this also expands the attack
surface for cybercriminals and digital bad actors.

How Lenovo Enables Digital Workplace Transformation
Lenovo's Digital Workplace Solutions (DWS) offering combines several digital workplace advisory
services. Among these are persona-based endpoint device configuration and provisioning. This is a
critical step in optimizing what types of devices, apps, and support functions are necessary based on
business use cases and worker types. Collaboration and productivity tools and templated frameworks
are also built out, as well as proper security software tools and services needed to support workers,
their devices, digital activities, and goals.
There is also an integrated service desk function for ongoing support and incident management forend users. All these features adhere to the IDW three-layer model of workspace device, app, andsupport infrastructure framework and allow for end users to be as digitally productive as possible while
getting technology into workers' hands more quickly and securely than in legacy deployment
scenarios.
DWS combines several intelligent digital workspace technologies into a single as-a-service delivered
solution, targeting organizations that want to transform their end-user computing environments withoutburdening existing IT staff and resources.

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A critical component of this offering is the unified endpoint management platform, which underpins
much of the delivery options from the technology. Lenovo's approach is to use market-leading UEM
tools as the centerpiece of the solution. On top of these core platforms, Lenovo delivers multi-OS
support for management, control, and security.
As enterprises adopt more types of endpoints, DWS can also expand to cover management andsecurity use cases for endpoints such as augmented and virtual reality headsets (now being used in awide range use cases across medical, logistics, field engineering, and other industries) as well asenterprise wearables for gathering and tracking critical business–related telemetry on employees'
location and other activities, including environmental and physical safety.
Beyond the core capabilities of UEM, Lenovo offers a broader set of infrastructure software
technologies that include encryption management for end-user devices, antimalware and antivirus
technology for endpoint security, software license, and IT asset management tools as well as PC
image management functionality.
This is a major differentiation. In Lenovo's DWS offering, compared with the way traditional PCs havebeen distributed and provisioned, device delivery times, as well as the time it takes users to go fromdevice request to being productive working with a new device, are greatly reduced. Lenovo takes what
was, on average, once a 10-step to 12-step process (involving long wait times for devices as well as
manual and labor-intensive provisioning configuration and imaging of endpoints) and converts this into
a 6-step rollout playbook.
With these features, Lenovo couples strong service-level agreements and ongoing measurements of
end-user satisfaction and productivity with the technology tools it deploys. Using a combination ofscoring techniques and data gathering (including D-Sat, Net Promoter Score, and Customer Support
Effort) scores, Lenovo is able to continuously measure how workers are using the technology they'vebeen given as well as measure the sentiment they have toward the technology itself. This delivers
strong service satisfaction and keeps end-user productivity high.
In terms of intelligence infused into the offering, telemetry data is collected from managed endpoints
constantly. This data is analyzed to monitor device performance, anticipate or predict potential failureof endpoint technologies, and detect anomalies in terms of endpoint behavior and atypical usage.
These analytics capabilities built into the offering can trigger automated scripts to help quickly resolve
discovered issues to minimize impacts to end-user productivity.
The end goal of DWS is not deployment and management of a certain IT product or service. It's topersonalize end-user experiences, allowing workers to be collaborative and productive from anywhere,
while leveraging organizational knowledge and expertise.
Lenovo helps deliver this with an omni-channel, single-touch point experience for DWS customers,
allowing support and customer care to be delivered anywhere and at any time. This includes proactive,
anticipatory support and IT problem resolution (i.e., seeing problems before they become trouble
tickets and closing tickets quickly and efficiently if they do arise). This capability is fueled by Lenovo's
robust cognitive AI, intelligence workflows, knowledge management, and personalization capabilities.
The vast breadth of Lenovo's offering in terms of geographical coverage is another advantage to theservice offering. The capability is offered across 180 countries with major service hubs in North
America, South America, Europe, and Asia.

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CONCLUSION
Connected employees, partners, and customers are redesigning how work is done. Knowledge
workers today are anyone, with or without a desk and company email address. They all create content
and data that creates value for the enterprise. IDC has identified an increase in partners and end-user
customers becoming part of an enterprise collaboration process. This is true for B2B and B2C
companies. The consumerization of collaboration and other mobile technologies has created acollaboration-ready workforce. Partners and customers are slowly moving from the buyer-seller
relationship to a maker-partner relationship where they are willing to help some businesses improvetheir offerings.
The move to hybrid work is reshaping traditional end-user computing management and security
models. Tools must evolve to deliver enterprise-class services to remote teams. Convergence of roles,
tools, and functions will disrupt traditional enterprise buying centers and channels. Organizations needto develop partnerships that will evolve with their needs.
Mobile, PC, and other endpoint management and activities are converging around a singular end-user
computing management function. Any part of IT that touches the end user (devices, security andmanagement/support tools, and apps) should incorporate the concepts of the intelligent digital
workspace.
Device management and endpoint security are becoming increasingly intertwined and integrated. In
summary, enterprises looking to digitally transform their workplaces and workspaces will be in the best
position to succeed if they can align IT organizational functions, roles, and tools using services such as
Lenovo's DSW offering.

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9About IDC
International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory
services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology
markets. IDC helps IT professionals, business executives, and the investment community make factbased decisions on technology purchases and business strategy. More than 1,100 IDC analysts
provide global, regional, and local expertise on technology and industry opportunities and trends inover 110 countries worldwide. For 50 years, IDC has provided strategic insights to help our clientsachieve their key business objectives. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology
media, research, and events company.

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