A Look to the Future – What Does the Ideal IT Office Look Like?
Triple security and VR headsets: the IT office of the future
Modern login methods, shared devices, and the metaverse: What will the ideal IT office of the future look like? Will there even be such a thing as an office anymore? IT expert Johan Peereboom looks ahead and takes you along for the ride. The question for you is: Is your organization even a little bit ready for what’s to come?
Where Interaction Takes Center Stage
To get right to the point: according to Johan, the office will continue to exist in the future. “But we’ll be using it differently. It’s increasingly becoming a kind of clubhouse, where—between meetings—you can do work that’s more geared toward in-person interaction. What you miss online is what you want to have in the office. Think of being able to switch gears quickly, or bumping into colleagues.”
What does that look like, according to Johan? Smaller meeting rooms instead of large conference rooms, so you can hold video calls without interruptions. Flexible workspaces where you can still sit together with your department. “The laptop will become the key player, but it may no longer belong to a single owner. You log in from anywhere, at a workspace of your choice, and immediately have access to all your data and information.”
Johan predicts that companies’ overall hardware offerings will expand. “To work efficiently, the use of multiple (sub)devices is becoming increasingly important. For example, you can sign something on a tablet, which then saves it directly in the right place.”
The Office of the Future
The hybrid employee has long been a familiar concept. Think of working from home and at the office, where the lines between work hours are becoming increasingly blurred. According to Johan, the home office is definitely still in its infancy. “A lot is going to change—in terms of ergonomics—the occupational health and safety department is much stricter about that at the office—but certainly also in terms of (hardware) security. Right now, we have a simple solution: here’s your laptop; good luck working from home. At the office, we pay close attention to security; at home, we have less control over it.”
“Multifactor authentication is rapidly gaining traction. With this method, you don’t need a single password; instead, you answer two or three personal questions, for example, before gaining access. Another factor is that a home is generally more vulnerable to break-ins than an office building. The Wi-Fi environment is also often more vulnerable. In the future, the requirements for working from home will likely increase.”
A show that's a bit out of your comfort zone
The further we look into the future of the office, the harder it is for Pim to predict. More and more data, from 4G to 5G or even 6G. “Maybe you’ll have a workspace in the Metaverse, a network of interconnected virtual 3D spaces. It’ll feel like you’re at the office, even though you’re on the other side of the world wearing your VR headset.”
Holding meetings with holograms at the table, so you can still see facial expressions and movements even from a distance. Or Augmented Reality: you see your screen and keyboard in front of you, but they aren’t physically there. “Your entire workspace—everything you need—in a single pair of glasses. It’s hard to predict where we’re headed in the future. What is clear, however, is that the experience and the quality of interaction are becoming increasingly important, and IT hardware will be increasingly tailored to that.”