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 Today in Health it, this story is Microsoft, Viva, and the Future of Remote Work. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping Health IT staff current and engaged. No sponsor. Today, I'm hosting a webinar next week.

Just wanted to make you aware of that. It's on the Future of Care Spaces and specifically the impact of digital on care in the rooms. I met with the panel earlier this week and it's gonna be a good one. If you're interested in signing up for this, go ahead over to my LinkedIn page, bill j Russell and I did a post yesterday on this, and you can find the link to the registration page on that post.

Alright, here's today's story. I. Microsoft launches Veeva, I bet on the future of remote work. This is from The Verge is where I pulled it. It's actually from February 4th, but it's relevant. Microsoft Veeva is Microsoft's new push for helping businesses with remote work and a big bet on this new way of life becoming the new norm.

The world has seen underlying nearly 11 months of a pandemic that has reshaped how people work, learn, and live as the world recovers. There's no. Going back. Flexibility in when, where, and how we work will be key. Alright, that's the why. Why we're doing it. Let's see what they're rolling out. We need to stop thinking about work as a place and start thinking about how to maintain culture, connect employees, and harness human ingenuity.

In a hybrid world said Jared Spiro, head of Microsoft Office 365. Spiro was quick to predict early on in the pandemic that it would forever change the way we work and learn, and Microsoft Viva is clearly the result of trends. Microsoft has been witnessing designing for this new flexible digital work era.

Veeva integrates into Microsoft Teams makes sense and works rather like the intranet of old. Hmm. I'm, I'm sure Microsoft would rather not have you say that By collecting essential parts of the business into a central location, Microsoft is splitting Veeva up into four specific modules, connections, insights, topics, and learnings.

All right, let's break those down. There's four areas, again, connections. Insights, topics and learning connections includes internal communications or resources like benefits and company policies. It's also designed to be the portal you head to if you just started working at the company and you've never even met your coworkers due the pandemic lockdowns, you can think of it as a gateway to your digital workplace.

Explains ero. Viva Connections is built on top of SharePoint. That's sad. I really wish SharePoint would go away. Maybe it's a good foundational platform, but anyway, it's there. And it will include things like company news, town halls, and even employee resource groups and communities. It's basically a dashboard for connecting with colleagues remotely.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's essentially a social media platform is what they're going for. For work. I. We will talk about that a little bit later. Microsoft says, Veeva Insights, which is the next module, will include data for managers and leaders to monitor work patterns and trends, but that privacy will be protected, that this means personal insights are visible only to employees.

While insights for managers and leaders are aggregated and de-identified by default to protect individual. Privacy. This is due to a misstep a little while ago in their Microsoft Productivity suite that they rolled out, Veeva Learning. Next module is Microsoft's third module in Veeva, and like the name implies, it's about employee learning and development.

This essentially an LMS platform. This is where employees will house training materials, courses, and other content for employee education. Okay, the last module inside Veeva is topics. Think of Veeva topics as Wikipedia for the organization. And, you know, for a really large organization, this is absolutely necessary.

So that's, that's the when, that's when it's coming out. Let's get to my so what on this? You know, the nature of work has changed. No one's denying that and those hoping it goes back to what it was before, are probably pining for an era that will never be again. Once we get to that point, we ask ourselves beyond Zoom and Teams, what tools are we going to need to make this work?

You know, I've spoken to several leaders who talk about the challenge that new employees, specifically employees that have been hired since the beginning of the pandemic are having, getting acclimated to their new teams. They've never met with their coworkers in person. The connection that would normally happen and the information sharing of work norms and cultural nuance that occurs as part of the normal work life is not nearly as organic as it was in person.

I. So along comes Veeva. This is essentially an LMSA, Wikipedia, a social media platform for work and a productivity dashboard. LMS makes perfect sense. Wikipedia for work is interesting for large organizations. Social media for work is kind of an oxymoron. I launched a platform internally on Salesforce.

For our health system with limited success, really, people don't want another platform to have to log onto. And email is really the preferred social media platform in healthcare. And, you know, a, a productivity platform, which is what insights is, is great for managers, but it will be resisted by the staff.

And this is what they found in their mistake and they're hoping to correct that. With the privacy measures they've put into this, we, we like to think that we have autonomy even. When we don't, you know, my boss trusts me and I, I can make my own way in the world or in this company, in this case, anything that strikes against that idea is going to find resistance.

So you gotta, you have to be careful with some of these tools and make sure they, they get positioned correctly in people's minds. You know, my final take on this. We need tools like Veeva moving forward. There's, there's no doubt about that. There are gaps that have been created in the transition to work from home.

Would I experiment with Veeva? Absolutely. It is directionally sound as are most technology concepts at the start, but we need to understand the psychological and sociological impacts of the technology we're deploying into our companies. A technology project that doesn't get adopted is a waste of time at best, and it really, beyond that, it's a really a net negative in so many ways.

You have to begin with adoption in mind. That's all for today. If you know of someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple, Google Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher. You get the picture. We are everywhere.

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