The average person has personal access to mobile technology, a trend that raises expectations for employees to have the same mobile capabilities throughout the workspace. The result for enterprise environments is a growing layer of collaborative mobile applications to solve business problems, driving the need to modernize the workplace with sentient, intelligence-based collaboration products.

Such seamless interaction for collaborative work is seeing the enablement of in-house IT departments to manage the digital transformation across infrastructure for integration, security and governance. Empowering IT can’t happen without collaboration from enterprise service providers, as HPE knows all too well having pared down its company offerings, including its software business. With a joint effort that includes HPE, Citrix, Intel and various other technology companies behind its Moonshot for Mobile Workspace, HPE leverages the integrated platform to create a worker-centric experience where mobile devices sync with office technology silently and in the background.

To provide perspective into the changing workplace, Kitty Chow, worldwide marketing technology services networking and mobility at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., joined Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Paul Gillin (@pgillin), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, at the HPE Discover EU conference in London to explain how HPE is transforming the workplace into a more collaborative and intuitive space. (*Disclosure below)

This week, theCUBE spotlights Kitty Chow in our Women In Tech feature.

Collaboration simplified for the end user

Chow works with HPE customers in a consulting capacity and as an enabler to help companies achieve the outcomes they need from technology. “At the end of the day, it really is all about what you are doing with the technology as opposed to the technology itself,” she stated, clarifying what her team does.

According to one study, employees dedicate 80 percent of their workday to collaboration and much of this time involves technology. So simplifying the end user’s ease with technology is at the core of HPE’s networking and consulting business.

Adoption of technology increases by providing experiences that are relevant to the worker. According to Chow, one of the things demonstrated at the show included how to bring identity context, location context and collaboration technologies in the workplace to orchestrate and personalize user experience to achieve meaningful outcomes.

Chow gave an example of the intelligence basis workspace by putting the technology in the background. A conference room would now be intelligent enough to greet you and allow you to work without cables and plugs. “All you have to do to collaborate is go on your device that you typically use and press a button, and you’re collaborating with other people,” she illustrated.

It’s a process to implement technology smart enough to change its own settings with each individual worker. To this end HPE offers a Transformation Workshop for customers to work with HPE facilitators to create an environment that aligns a business’ goals with current technology.

“Our focus is less about transforming the business process. It’s about how technology can enable the business of the client and how we can actually marry up the technology with the things that customers are trying to accomplish,” Chow asserted.

Change management requires transitioning employees to digital assets by increasing adoption and understanding of new applications. Her team handles management change to help clients keep up with the rapid pace of innovation. “The great thing about consulting is that we can do things in a custom manner. I think the utopia, from an economic benefits standpoint, would be if you could find the intersection between customization, which is all about personalization, and the economics of mass, standardization,” said Chow.

Gone are the cube farm days of old, according to Chow. Her clients are looking for ways to achieve mobile work, activity-based work and real-time, dynamic collaboration, she said, acknowledging that “the physical spaces and the way you set those up and deliver technology to enable [collaboration] is really changing.”

Addressing this transition at the IT level can help the enterprise retain a good chunk of what could be a very frustrated administrative department struggling to maintain outdated technologies. A Forrester study showed that companies could retain 71 percent of their IT staff just by making investments in a modern, digital collaboration solution. So, HPE has created an intelligence basis workplace to improve the user experience and expand capabilities to IT to facilities to better manage and operate those spaces.

In Chow’s experience, she’s seen trends change over time, observing the need to shift a combination of the physical and virtual workspace. “What’s really important is that experience has to be stellar. You need to be able to do the work you are tasked to do,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover EU. (*Disclosure: HPE and other companies sponsor some HPE Discover EU segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither HPE nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE