When I've joined panels on how to help companies become more collaborative with technology, I discuss how complex, involved and expensive the process can be. Why can't it be simple, yet effective? Do all businesses have to go through the same experience as large organizations? Do small and medium, businesses have the same needs? Perhaps it is a narrow vision, but sometimes people outside the IT world can see it more clearly.
Architect Arthur Mamou-Mani has a vision: “In the future, collaboration will be fluidified even more. You will have file sharing that is in a way is live. So what you design, you know in your VR goggles, you will see as someone else creating in front of you, even though he is on the other side of the globe. You will share physical objects at the same time, although you are in a digital world. So, in a way, the concept of distance will be very different.”
Similarly, Braintribe CEO Stefan Ebner says, “Empowering people with technology to build something new. This for me will be the future of work. Infrastructure technology is built for this one percent of human beings they are specialist, technologists, developers. We want to empower the 99% of this world where everyone needs data. We want to give you a platform that even if you are not a developer, you can build your own application.”
Both Arthur and Stefan are not specialists in collaboration. Yet, they can see a similar simpler vision of what it means to collaborate online. They can look past the challenges of using instrumentation and culture change that stump many large organizations by asking: How can my team collaborate better?
Technologists are often overwhelmed by the complexities of culture change, governance and leadership needed to build collaboration across a large organization of hundreds of thousands of employees. We may overlook how simple it can be when working with small groups or teams in small and medium businesses. It is refreshing to hear of a new possibility that allows organizations to begin at a smaller level and then scale to larger networks of teams.
At the unveiling of Konica Minolta's new Workplace Hub in Berlin on March 24, the global company made a distinctive step in a new direction. Konica Minolta has long been known in industries including office equipment, camera lenses and IT services. What CEO Shoei Yamana revealed may be an evolution of the company, a step to address the changing needs of small and medium businesses trying to stay competitive in the future of work.
This is as surprising a pivot for the 43,000-plus employee company, worth $8.6 billion. In 2006, Konica Minolta sold its photography and film business to Sony. It kept its patents and photographic technologies, as well as its commercial/industrial printer business and industrial optical systems (lens, digital manufacturing, spectrometers, etc.) and materials (OLED technology, precision photo plates, etc.). It then expanded into the healthcare instruments business (digital x-ray systems, digital mammograms, etc.).
Konica Minolta is increasing its IT solutions aimed at industries like education, government, legal, health care, finance, manufacturing and graphical communications. In the legal industry for example, it offers different solutions for eDiscovery and compliance for law firms, document collaboration and disaster recovery for corporate counsels, cost control, secure printing and mobility management.
Today, Konica Minolta has a strong presence in the SMB market with office products, Internet of Things sensors, and medical systems and scientific equipment. At first glance, this struck me as disjointed pieces of a conglomerate. But this new announcement helped create a vision that brings these various units together with a new purpose.
With this recent unveiling, Konica Minolta has entered a market that aims to support the future digital workplace. At the event, CEO Yamana described what he sees: “What do I want in my future workplace? A system that enables me to instantly recall details about past decisions, timely prompting me about [current developments] that helps me make the best decisions for our corporate future, when I need to make them.”
Konica Minolta has announced its Workplace Hub, a combination of hardware servers, printing, software and IT services, built by Konica Minolta or in partnership with HP Enterprise, Microsoft and other partners. It comes in three hardware versions: a server built into a multifunction printer, and two others without printers, a desktop Workplace Edge and a rackmount version. Unlike other collaboration tech vendors, Konica Minolta’s goal is not to provide their own set of applications, but rather to provide the glue and interface that unifies other platforms.
Think of this scenario, set in a law firm with a hundred or so employees: A team member can connect to the Workplace Hub to see their digital self, a unified interface that provides access to their calendar, email, documents and associated files related to their cases, eDiscovery searches and other documents for compliance checking or managed reviews. They can see the state of various workflows they are involved in, and access and manage secure printers across their office network. An artificial intelligence assistant in the digital self can assist with decisions or do simple tasks like setting up and supporting a meeting. Their privacy center can limit a legal team member’s access to the specific material per the context of their case.
At the Berlin event, Dr. Dennis Curry, VP and director of Business Innovation and R&D at Konica Minolta, said, “[Workplace Hub] simplifies IT operations today and paves the way for exciting new integrations, such as AI and intelligent edge computing, to become a central part of the digital organization of the future.”
More broadly, Konica Minolta wants to connect the devices of the world through the (IoT. They have APIs that allows IoT sensors and devices to communicate with the Workplace Hub, delivering information that can then be displayed as a monitoring or management dashboard. This same API also aims to connect to ERP, enterprise databases and other software systems.
The main goal of the Konica Minolta Workplace Hub is to simplify access and collaboration for everyone beyond the world of IT. Hence, each piece—the user interface of the digital self, the semantic technology based artificial intelligence, the privacy center, the data dashboards—aims to simplify how an office worker can access information from many different sources, without having to become a power user themselves.
“Innovation is not only about developing and connecting superior devices. It is about connecting people with intelligently analyzed data,” says CEO Yamana. This points to why Konica Minolta is looking beyond just connecting people through collaboration. It is bringing together the data that emerges from many sources and connected devices, analyzed with the help of semantic and AI technology, into this collaborative environment to support decision-making.
A Change For Konica Minolta
Konica Minolta is taking the idea of “multifunction” to a new level. Their Workplace Hub and Edge (server without the printer) combines printing, WiFi hub, user manager, security system, office software manager and data dashboard all into one. Conceptually, this extends the footprint they already have in offices everywhere with a solution aiming to simplify the concepts of the digital workplace for SMBs.
Konica Minolta has a strong base in the SMB market across various industries and geographies. Their market by revenue is highest in EMEA (31%), then the U.S. (25.9%), Asian countries other than Japan (23.7%) and Japan (19.4%). Their re-seller network is likewise extensive.
To make it easier for SMBs—many do not have large IT teams that can build or manage systems across a spread of users and offices—the Konica Minolta Workplace Hub and Edge would be offered as a managed platform service to customers that could grow with the customer’s business. For example, a customer could start with one Hub in a particular office, and then later add more hubs for other offices that could then cross-connect their network as needed. You could keep them as separate offices or merge them together as a larger multi-office intranet. Many popular applications, such as Microsoft Office 365, are run directly from the cloud. Even your desktop can be interchangeable and virtual using Konica Minolta’s privacy center bringing in only the documents and applications you need for the project you are working on.
The end result is a combination of necessary office hardware, a management dashboard (for data security, assets, users), team spaces for employees, partners or customers, artificial intelligent agents, an app marketplace platform to add new software, and managed IT services to run it for you. Konica Minolta seems to have created a modern digital-workplace-in-a-box solution to help make team collaboration a reality for SMBs in different industries. Echoing the views of Arthur Mamou-Mani and Stefan Ebner at the beginning, Dr. Curry explains it best in terms of Konica Minolta’s hopes: “This really represents a shift towards empowering creativity and efficiency at the edge.”
