Original article Intelligent workplace, l’ambiente di lavoro diventa fluido
In July 2024 I was invited by Data Manager to participate to a very interesting round-table.
The round table included representatives from SAS, PwC, NextThink, DeAgostini (a major Italian publisher), NPO (a 450+ professionals integrator), and Emilia Romagna (the IT department of a regional public sector).
Here you can find the translation from the original Data Manager page.
The role of technology in the process of transforming the way work is particularly relevant in large organizations. When corporate structures are extensive, spread across multiple locations and countries, technology not only facilitates the adoption of new working models, but also becomes a central element in ensuring consistency and operational efficiency on a large scale. Managing and integrating complex systems, communicating between distributed teams and maintaining a robust IT infrastructure requires advanced, well-designed technology solutions to ensure that the transformation is smooth and sustainable. This is the case for Solvay, a Belgian multinational with a deep-rooted presence in Italy. Roberto Carnevale, technical lead Infrastructure & workplace at the company explains the task the IT department is called upon to support a model whereby work is done from everywhere.
“Our teams were already used to using digital communication systems. This certainly helped the transition to a working methodology that moved us to the periphery with the need not to change the internal balance much. Solvay’s IT organization,” Carnevale adds, ”has about five hundred professionals and has been a driving force in enabling the entire corporate population, a total of 22 thousand people (including the recent Syensqo spin-off), to use technological tools in a new way. We have moved from a model whereby employees were provided with PCs and desk phones to a model that is based on connectivity to systems in the cloud, in service mode.”
From a server-centric vision based on a centralized, on-premise data center, Solvay has shifted to a distributed logic, embracing the BYOD (bring your own device) and transforming the corporate PC into a device configured piece by piece to be managed securely even remotely.
The pandemic accelerated an organization-wide change, turning it into a necessary standard for managing a fully virtual work environment.
“We went in the direction of servitizing the workplace and the hardware endowment of each employee, abandoning the logic of the physical asset in favor of a model that converted both the desktop and the workplace into service and brought applications, files and documents to the cloud,” – Carnevale points out. “It was a profound work of re-thinking the management of the installed base, which required and still requires careful and meticulous coaching of users to help them overcome the fear of entering a new working mode, much more fluid than the previous one.”