Most Organisations Already Have One — The Question Is Whether It Was Designed
Most organisations using Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, an HR self-service hub, or a corporate intranet already have a digital workspace platform. The question is whether it was built as a coherent platform or assembled as a collection of tools that were never meant to connect cleanly.
For most organisations, the honest answer is the latter. The 2023 Microsoft Work Trend Index found that 68% of people say they do not have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday, and 62% say they struggle with too much time searching for information. These are not behavioural problems. They are architecture problems: information cannot flow cleanly between disconnected systems, so workers absorb the coordination cost the architecture failed to handle.
Three Layers That Must Be Designed Together
A digital workspace platform is built from three connected layers:
- The digital layer is the foundation: collaboration, knowledge, and communication tools (Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint, intranet, document management). Most organisations have invested significantly here. The challenge is that deployment was typically driven by speed rather than platform design — tools provisioned, the layer not designed.
- The automation layer handles workflow orchestration and service delivery: ITSM platforms, HR service hubs, employee self-service, onboarding workflows. This layer is almost always built in isolation from the digital foundation beneath it.
- The physical layer covers the device environment, on-device AI capability, and how the physical workspace shapes human-machine interaction. AI PCs shipping at scale from 2024 onward are shifting what is possible here. Organisations treating device refresh purely as a hardware decision are making architecture choices whose consequences will compound over the next three to five years.
The design principle connecting all three: when you build or extend any one layer, design it with explicit connections to the others — not as future integrations, but as dependencies to specify now.
Working Tools, No Platform: The Gap Shows Up as Friction
A new employee at an organisation running Microsoft 365, ServiceNow, Workday, and Microsoft Copilot still spends their first week navigating four separate systems with no connection between them. Each tool works. None were deployed as part of a platform. The worker experiences the gap as friction. The organisation experiences it as support volume, low adoption scores, and a growing integration backlog. The fix is not replacing the tools. It is designing the layer they are supposed to form.
A Tool Portfolio Is Not a Platform
A digital workspace platform is not the same as a collection of digital workplace tools. Adding Copilot to an organisation that already runs Teams, ServiceNow, and SharePoint does not create a digital workspace platform. Deploying each tool well is a prerequisite, not a substitute. A platform requires defined connections between the layers — data contracts, interface logic, and sequencing decisions — that no individual tool deployment provides. Organisations that mistake a large tool portfolio for a platform design typically discover the gap when they try to deploy an AI layer on top of a workspace where data ownership is unresolved.
