A recent survey by Gartner, Inc. found that 47% of digital workers struggle to find information or data needed to effectively perform their jobs.
“Employees struggle to stay afloat as information and applications flood their digital workplace. Although digital workers are putting in effort to try to efficiently manage this content to try reduce duplication and/or improve knowledge sharing and retention, finding the information needed to do their jobs can often be a challenge,” said Tori Paulman, Sr Director Analyst at Gartner. “Digital workplace leaders need to create a process for their employees that enables them to agree on applications they use to accomplish work.”
The Gartner survey was conducted from September through November 2022 among 4,861 full-time employees that use digital technology for work purposes, at organizations with 100 or more employees in the U.S., U.K., India and China.
Workers Want the Right Tools to Do the Job
According to the survey, the average number of applications a desk worker, also referred to as a “knowledge worker,” uses is 11, compared to six applications in 2019. Forty percent of digital workers are using more than the average number of applications and 5% of workers use 26 or more applications at work.
On an average, 66% of the respondents agreed that better business outcomes could be achieved if IT provided universally accepted and supported applications and devices to get work done. When a digital workplace applications strategy attempts to solve every challenge with a new application, the result is that digital workers struggle to find information, make the wrong decisions due to lack of awareness, get irrelevant notifications and miss important updates amid the noise (see Figure 1).