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ON DIGITAL STRATEGY
Open Collaboration is the Most Strategic Model. I’ll be very clear then as to the core lesson here: By default the single best model for digital communication and collaboration — and the one that produces the most human engagement and the richest outcomes — is ABOUT | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, enterprise architect, transformation consultant, futurist, analyst and in-demand keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in customer experience, digital workplace, technology strategy, and enterprise IT. Dion is currently VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research where he headsDIGITAL WORKPLACE
Posts about Digital Workplace written by dionhinchcliffe. It is a remarkable time in this particular moment in human history, where most organizations have become almost entirely distributed, yet for the first time still remain largely functional. A CHECKLIST FOR A MODERN CORE DIGITAL WORKPLACE AND/OR One of the most challenging questions to answer about digital employee experience today is where the center of gravity for it lies. As in, where does the worker, by default, spend most of their time using it.The answer used to be that the worker themselves determines it, often with specific guidance or training, by figuring out how to apply the devices, applications, tools, and platforms to FOUR STRATEGIC FRAMEWORKS FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Less of a framework and more of a description of the transformation journey from silos of function (marketing, sales, delivery, operations, customer service, R&D/innovation) to the three main experiences that must result from a successful digital transformation. Right now, customer experience is the focus, with employee experiencea distant
DESIGNING THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE FOR THE END-TO-END As digital becomes instrumental to virtually every aspect of how we do our work in organizations today, two parallel and closely related concerns have joined the industry discussion. These two concerns, workforce engagement (which technology can very much help with) and the employee journey, have risen as urgent topics and joined the overall conversation about THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITAL It's a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace, and it includes all the devices, apps, WHAT ARE THE REQUIRED SKILLS FOR TODAY’S DIGITAL WORKFORCE Next-generation organizations will actively work to reduce needless activities like excessive meetings by creating required time for the strategic activities of acquisition, management, and sense-making of digital knowledge. These skills are foundational to adapting more swiftly and organically to rapidly changing operating environments. HOW IT AND THE ROLE OF THE CIO IS CHANGING IN THE ERA OF Here are other essential stories of CIOs realizing IT in new, more decentralized, collaborative, and bottom-up ways: AstraZeneca. CIO David Smoley remade IT at the pharmaceutical giant to be a learning and collaborative organization focused on the customer and technical leadership, he recommends, “that, in addition to embracing technology, they better understand the business, focus THE RISE OF THE 4TH PLATFORM: PERVASIVE COMMUNITY, DATA These days it's still pretty common to talk about social business, mobility, analytics (especially when it's called big data), cloud, and the Internet of Things -- SMACT is the current acronym for all this -- as on the agenda of key digital improvements underway in the typical enterprise. While many organizations have executed solid startsON DIGITAL STRATEGY
Open Collaboration is the Most Strategic Model. I’ll be very clear then as to the core lesson here: By default the single best model for digital communication and collaboration — and the one that produces the most human engagement and the richest outcomes — is ABOUT | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, enterprise architect, transformation consultant, futurist, analyst and in-demand keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in customer experience, digital workplace, technology strategy, and enterprise IT. Dion is currently VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research where he headsDIGITAL WORKPLACE
Posts about Digital Workplace written by dionhinchcliffe. It is a remarkable time in this particular moment in human history, where most organizations have become almost entirely distributed, yet for the first time still remain largely functional. A CHECKLIST FOR A MODERN CORE DIGITAL WORKPLACE AND/OR One of the most challenging questions to answer about digital employee experience today is where the center of gravity for it lies. As in, where does the worker, by default, spend most of their time using it.The answer used to be that the worker themselves determines it, often with specific guidance or training, by figuring out how to apply the devices, applications, tools, and platforms to FOUR STRATEGIC FRAMEWORKS FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Less of a framework and more of a description of the transformation journey from silos of function (marketing, sales, delivery, operations, customer service, R&D/innovation) to the three main experiences that must result from a successful digital transformation. Right now, customer experience is the focus, with employee experiencea distant
DESIGNING THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE FOR THE END-TO-END As digital becomes instrumental to virtually every aspect of how we do our work in organizations today, two parallel and closely related concerns have joined the industry discussion. These two concerns, workforce engagement (which technology can very much help with) and the employee journey, have risen as urgent topics and joined the overall conversation about THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITAL It's a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace, and it includes all the devices, apps, WHAT ARE THE REQUIRED SKILLS FOR TODAY’S DIGITAL WORKFORCE Next-generation organizations will actively work to reduce needless activities like excessive meetings by creating required time for the strategic activities of acquisition, management, and sense-making of digital knowledge. These skills are foundational to adapting more swiftly and organically to rapidly changing operating environments. HOW IT AND THE ROLE OF THE CIO IS CHANGING IN THE ERA OF Here are other essential stories of CIOs realizing IT in new, more decentralized, collaborative, and bottom-up ways: AstraZeneca. CIO David Smoley remade IT at the pharmaceutical giant to be a learning and collaborative organization focused on the customer and technical leadership, he recommends, “that, in addition to embracing technology, they better understand the business, focus THE RISE OF THE 4TH PLATFORM: PERVASIVE COMMUNITY, DATA These days it's still pretty common to talk about social business, mobility, analytics (especially when it's called big data), cloud, and the Internet of Things -- SMACT is the current acronym for all this -- as on the agenda of key digital improvements underway in the typical enterprise. While many organizations have executed solid starts THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITAL It's a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace, and it includes all the devices, apps, IT’S TIME TO THINK ABOUT THE POST-2020 EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE The Post-2020 Employee Experience Has No Silos, No Barriers, No Limits. As part of this, I’ve synthesized what I believe is a unified view of what the post-2020 digital employee experience stack looks like, given the pandemic, latest industry trends, and other factors I’ll explore soon. Given the scope of the entire employeeexperience
HOW WORK WILL EVOLVE IN A DIGITAL POST-PANDEMIC SOCIETY How Work Will Evolve in a Digital Post-Pandemic Society. The current outbreak of COVID-19 is stress testing our institutions, infrastructure, governments, and societies more than any event in most of our lifetimes. We have to go all the way back to the two World Wars to find similar precedents. Yet, as our businesses and personal livesare
A CHECKLIST FOR A MODERN CORE DIGITAL WORKPLACE AND/OR One of the most challenging questions to answer about digital employee experience today is where the center of gravity for it lies. As in, where does the worker, by default, spend most of their time using it.The answer used to be that the worker themselves determines it, often with specific guidance or training, by figuring out how to apply the devices, applications, tools, and platforms toDIGITAL WORKPLACE
Posts about Digital Workplace written by dionhinchcliffe. It is a remarkable time in this particular moment in human history, where most organizations have become almost entirely distributed, yet for the first time still remain largely functional. USING ONLINE COMMUNITY FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION The community as a whole becomes a massive learning repository, a sort of self-documenting and emergent MOOC for digital transformation adapted to the organization, with lessons learned and best practices culled by facilitators and spread to change agents. Empowerment. A community of transformation spreads knowledge, resources, know-how,and
HOW LEADERS CAN ADDRESS THE CHALLENGES OF DIGITAL 2015 marks ten years in which I've been working in the trenches with organizations at a leadership level to drive some form of major change that intertwines technology, networks, and people. Back in the early days it consisted mostly of the novel and heady topics of the Web 2.0 revolution. As things matured and the WHY MICROSERVICES WILL BECOME A CORE BUSINESS STRATEGY FOR As an industry, we have collectively returned to that eternal debate about what constitutes a largely technical evolution versus when an important digital idea becomes a full-blown business trend. This has happened before with Web sites, e-commerce, mobile applications, social media, and other well-known advances. It can be hard to remember that at first these INTERNET OF THINGS STRATEGY: IT WILL DETERMINE YOUR Few technology developments will ultimately have the global cultural, business, and economic impact of the Internet of Things (IoT.) While today IoT still looks like an industry largely concerning itself with factory automation, connected light bulbs, air conditioning controls and so on, the eventual objective is clear even to a casual observer: Nearly everything in SEEKING A MODERN FOUNDATION FOR THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE The second event is a Webcast of my latest research with Jive Software’s Gili Guri-Mill where I’ll explore why the enterprise social network is emerging at the leading candidate for the foundation of the digital workplace. This will be broadcast on September 15th, 2016 at 10am PT/1pm ET, and I’ll be taking questions towards theend.
ON DIGITAL STRATEGY
One of the most challenging questions to answer about digital employee experience today is where the center of gravity for it lies. As in, where does the worker, by default, spend most of their time using it.The answer used to be that the worker themselves determines it, often with specific guidance or training, by figuring out how to apply the devices, applications, tools, and platforms to ABOUT | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, enterprise architect, transformation consultant, futurist, analyst and in-demand keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in customer experience, digital workplace, technology strategy, and enterprise IT. Dion is currently VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research where he headsDIGITAL WORKPLACE
Posts about Digital Workplace written by dionhinchcliffe. It is a remarkable time in this particular moment in human history, where most organizations have become almost entirely distributed, yet for the first time still remain largely functional. THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITAL It's a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace, and it includes all the devices, apps, FOUR STRATEGIC FRAMEWORKS FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Collectively, the world of business and IT just isn’t learning about effective ways to digitally transform nearly as quickly as it could be or should be. However, as we reflect on previous efforts, we can begin to see why this is: Lack of good storytelling, inadequate structuring for speed and agility, poor sharing of effective best practices harvested from hard-won industry experiences, or WHAT ARE THE REQUIRED SKILLS FOR TODAY’S DIGITAL WORKFORCE As I spend a great deal of time every year looking at the latest technological advances for the enterprise, I've noticed a trend in recent years that's long been true but is clearly markedly accelerating. That trend is that technology has officially pulled well ahead of the workplace skills of even the most proactive manager DESIGNING THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE FOR THE END-TO-END As digital becomes instrumental to virtually every aspect of how we do our work in organizations today, two parallel and closely related concerns have joined the industry discussion. These two concerns, workforce engagement (which technology can very much help with) and the employee journey, have risen as urgent topics and joined the overall conversation about HOW SHOULD ORGANIZATIONS ACTUALLY GO ABOUT DIGITAL This is now the question that is top of mind in a large number of enterprises today, as speeding up adaptation to rapidly evolving digital markets is now not just a requirement to grow today, but increasingly to survive.. This is not incautious language and I’ve been pointing to the relatively urgent data for several years: One major slip as organizations fully digitize their workforces HOW IT AND THE ROLE OF THE CIO IS CHANGING IN THE ERA OF Here are other essential stories of CIOs realizing IT in new, more decentralized, collaborative, and bottom-up ways: AstraZeneca. CIO David Smoley remade IT at the pharmaceutical giant to be a learning and collaborative organization focused on the customer and technical leadership, he recommends, “that, in addition to embracing technology, they better understand the business, focus THE RISE OF THE 4TH PLATFORM: PERVASIVE COMMUNITY, DATA These days it's still pretty common to talk about social business, mobility, analytics (especially when it's called big data), cloud, and the Internet of Things -- SMACT is the current acronym for all this -- as on the agenda of key digital improvements underway in the typical enterprise. While many organizations have executed solid startsON DIGITAL STRATEGY
One of the most challenging questions to answer about digital employee experience today is where the center of gravity for it lies. As in, where does the worker, by default, spend most of their time using it.The answer used to be that the worker themselves determines it, often with specific guidance or training, by figuring out how to apply the devices, applications, tools, and platforms to ABOUT | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, enterprise architect, transformation consultant, futurist, analyst and in-demand keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in customer experience, digital workplace, technology strategy, and enterprise IT. Dion is currently VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research where he headsDIGITAL WORKPLACE
Posts about Digital Workplace written by dionhinchcliffe. It is a remarkable time in this particular moment in human history, where most organizations have become almost entirely distributed, yet for the first time still remain largely functional. THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITAL It's a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace, and it includes all the devices, apps, FOUR STRATEGIC FRAMEWORKS FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Collectively, the world of business and IT just isn’t learning about effective ways to digitally transform nearly as quickly as it could be or should be. However, as we reflect on previous efforts, we can begin to see why this is: Lack of good storytelling, inadequate structuring for speed and agility, poor sharing of effective best practices harvested from hard-won industry experiences, or WHAT ARE THE REQUIRED SKILLS FOR TODAY’S DIGITAL WORKFORCE As I spend a great deal of time every year looking at the latest technological advances for the enterprise, I've noticed a trend in recent years that's long been true but is clearly markedly accelerating. That trend is that technology has officially pulled well ahead of the workplace skills of even the most proactive manager DESIGNING THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE FOR THE END-TO-END As digital becomes instrumental to virtually every aspect of how we do our work in organizations today, two parallel and closely related concerns have joined the industry discussion. These two concerns, workforce engagement (which technology can very much help with) and the employee journey, have risen as urgent topics and joined the overall conversation about HOW SHOULD ORGANIZATIONS ACTUALLY GO ABOUT DIGITAL This is now the question that is top of mind in a large number of enterprises today, as speeding up adaptation to rapidly evolving digital markets is now not just a requirement to grow today, but increasingly to survive.. This is not incautious language and I’ve been pointing to the relatively urgent data for several years: One major slip as organizations fully digitize their workforces HOW IT AND THE ROLE OF THE CIO IS CHANGING IN THE ERA OF Here are other essential stories of CIOs realizing IT in new, more decentralized, collaborative, and bottom-up ways: AstraZeneca. CIO David Smoley remade IT at the pharmaceutical giant to be a learning and collaborative organization focused on the customer and technical leadership, he recommends, “that, in addition to embracing technology, they better understand the business, focus THE RISE OF THE 4TH PLATFORM: PERVASIVE COMMUNITY, DATA These days it's still pretty common to talk about social business, mobility, analytics (especially when it's called big data), cloud, and the Internet of Things -- SMACT is the current acronym for all this -- as on the agenda of key digital improvements underway in the typical enterprise. While many organizations have executed solid starts COVID-19 | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Posts about COVID-19 written by dionhinchcliffe. It is a remarkable time in this particular moment in human history, where most organizations have become almost entirely distributed, yet for the first time still remain largely functional. WORKSHOPS | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Dion prepares and delivers some of the most highly-rated workshops in the industry for top conferences and Fortune 500/Global 2000 onsite events, using his latest findings, client work, and renowned industry research. Workshops can be produced onsite -- or online -- just about anywhere in the world for your team to organize and fully activatearound an urgent
ON DIGITAL STRATEGY
The reality today is that despite seemingly endless advances and a steady river of emerging technologies, many of the key insights, strategies, and lessons in the digital age have still yet to be discovered.Looking back, we are frankly still early in the pioneering phase of digital, despite significant early ground being claimed and several generations of impressive success stories emerging. CSR | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Posts about CSR written by dionhinchcliffe. The current outbreak of COVID-19 is stress testing our institutions, infrastructure,governments, and
A CHECKLIST FOR A MODERN CORE DIGITAL WORKPLACE AND/OR One of the most challenging questions to answer about digital employee experience today is where the center of gravity for it lies. As in, where does the worker, by default, spend most of their time using it.The answer used to be that the worker themselves determines it, often with specific guidance or training, by figuring out how to apply the devices, applications, tools, and platforms toDESIGN THINKING
In these fraught times, most of us find that it’s quite challenging to think or plan about business longer term. Yet the benefits of doing are not only self-evident, it is likely critical at this moment to successfully navigate the challenging journey that now lies ahead ofus.
THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITAL It's a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace, and it includes all the devices, apps, USING ONLINE COMMUNITY FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Driving successful change in a large organization has always been one of the most difficult activities in business. But for those who are principally tasked with carrying their organizations forward into the digital future, they are currently facing perhaps the single most challenging large-scale enterprise activity of our time. One has onlyto look at
HOW IT CAN CHANGE FOR THE DIGITAL ERA AND WHAT LEADERS CAN I've recently come to believe that we're at a watershed moment in technology as it's applied to business. The aging, creaky model of centralized IT departments has been increasingly challenged by waves of internal and external competition that it's never had to face. It started with the outsourcing wave but picked up irresistible momentumwith
SEEKING A MODERN FOUNDATION FOR THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE Take a few minutes and try to imagine the workplace of the near future. What does it look like? Some of the likely items to consider are these: Are mobile, cloud-based productivity and collaboration apps the center of the next-generation digital workplace? Will we all switch over from e-mail to Slack-like lightweight messaging servicessupported
ON DIGITAL STRATEGY
Open Collaboration is the Most Strategic Model. I’ll be very clear then as to the core lesson here: By default the single best model for digital communication and collaboration — and the one that produces the most human engagement and the richest outcomes — is ABOUT | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, enterprise architect, transformation consultant, futurist, analyst and in-demand keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in customer experience, digital workplace, technology strategy, and enterprise IT. Dion is currently VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research where he headsDIGITAL WORKPLACE
Posts about Digital Workplace written by dionhinchcliffe. It is a remarkable time in this particular moment in human history, where most organizations have become almost entirely distributed, yet for the first time still remain largely functional. THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITAL It's a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace, and it includes all the devices, apps, WHAT ARE THE REQUIRED SKILLS FOR TODAY’S DIGITAL WORKFORCE Next-generation organizations will actively work to reduce needless activities like excessive meetings by creating required time for the strategic activities of acquisition, management, and sense-making of digital knowledge. These skills are foundational to adapting more swiftly and organically to rapidly changing operating environments. DESIGNING THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE FOR THE END-TO-END As digital becomes instrumental to virtually every aspect of how we do our work in organizations today, two parallel and closely related concerns have joined the industry discussion. These two concerns, workforce engagement (which technology can very much help with) and the employee journey, have risen as urgent topics and joined the overall conversation about FOUR STRATEGIC FRAMEWORKS FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Less of a framework and more of a description of the transformation journey from silos of function (marketing, sales, delivery, operations, customer service, R&D/innovation) to the three main experiences that must result from a successful digital transformation. Right now, customer experience is the focus, with employee experiencea distant
HOW SHOULD ORGANIZATIONS ACTUALLY GO ABOUT DIGITAL This is now the question that is top of mind in a large number of enterprises today, as speeding up adaptation to rapidly evolving digital markets is now not just a requirement to grow today, but increasingly to survive.. This is not incautious language and I’ve been pointing to the relatively urgent data for several years: One major slip as organizations fully digitize their workforces HOW IT AND THE ROLE OF THE CIO IS CHANGING IN THE ERA OF Here are other essential stories of CIOs realizing IT in new, more decentralized, collaborative, and bottom-up ways: AstraZeneca. CIO David Smoley remade IT at the pharmaceutical giant to be a learning and collaborative organization focused on the customer and technical leadership, he recommends, “that, in addition to embracing technology, they better understand the business, focus THE RISE OF THE 4TH PLATFORM: PERVASIVE COMMUNITY, DATA These days it's still pretty common to talk about social business, mobility, analytics (especially when it's called big data), cloud, and the Internet of Things -- SMACT is the current acronym for all this -- as on the agenda of key digital improvements underway in the typical enterprise. While many organizations have executed solid startsON DIGITAL STRATEGY
Open Collaboration is the Most Strategic Model. I’ll be very clear then as to the core lesson here: By default the single best model for digital communication and collaboration — and the one that produces the most human engagement and the richest outcomes — is ABOUT | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, enterprise architect, transformation consultant, futurist, analyst and in-demand keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in customer experience, digital workplace, technology strategy, and enterprise IT. Dion is currently VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research where he headsDIGITAL WORKPLACE
Posts about Digital Workplace written by dionhinchcliffe. It is a remarkable time in this particular moment in human history, where most organizations have become almost entirely distributed, yet for the first time still remain largely functional. THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITAL It's a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace, and it includes all the devices, apps, WHAT ARE THE REQUIRED SKILLS FOR TODAY’S DIGITAL WORKFORCE Next-generation organizations will actively work to reduce needless activities like excessive meetings by creating required time for the strategic activities of acquisition, management, and sense-making of digital knowledge. These skills are foundational to adapting more swiftly and organically to rapidly changing operating environments. DESIGNING THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE FOR THE END-TO-END As digital becomes instrumental to virtually every aspect of how we do our work in organizations today, two parallel and closely related concerns have joined the industry discussion. These two concerns, workforce engagement (which technology can very much help with) and the employee journey, have risen as urgent topics and joined the overall conversation about FOUR STRATEGIC FRAMEWORKS FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Less of a framework and more of a description of the transformation journey from silos of function (marketing, sales, delivery, operations, customer service, R&D/innovation) to the three main experiences that must result from a successful digital transformation. Right now, customer experience is the focus, with employee experiencea distant
HOW SHOULD ORGANIZATIONS ACTUALLY GO ABOUT DIGITAL This is now the question that is top of mind in a large number of enterprises today, as speeding up adaptation to rapidly evolving digital markets is now not just a requirement to grow today, but increasingly to survive.. This is not incautious language and I’ve been pointing to the relatively urgent data for several years: One major slip as organizations fully digitize their workforces HOW IT AND THE ROLE OF THE CIO IS CHANGING IN THE ERA OF Here are other essential stories of CIOs realizing IT in new, more decentralized, collaborative, and bottom-up ways: AstraZeneca. CIO David Smoley remade IT at the pharmaceutical giant to be a learning and collaborative organization focused on the customer and technical leadership, he recommends, “that, in addition to embracing technology, they better understand the business, focus THE RISE OF THE 4TH PLATFORM: PERVASIVE COMMUNITY, DATA These days it's still pretty common to talk about social business, mobility, analytics (especially when it's called big data), cloud, and the Internet of Things -- SMACT is the current acronym for all this -- as on the agenda of key digital improvements underway in the typical enterprise. While many organizations have executed solid starts COVID-19 | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE How Work Will Evolve in a Digital Post-Pandemic Society. April 15, 2020 1 Comment. The current outbreak of COVID-19 is stress testing our institutions, infrastructure, governments, and societies more than any event in most of our lifetimes. We have to go all the way back to the two World Wars to find similar precedents. ARTICLES AND INTERVIEWS Articles and Interviews. External articles, interviews, industry collaboration, and press appearances quoting Dion or exploring his ideas and work: Interview: The intersection of technology and business (September, 2020) | Fellow Digitals. Digital employee experience a new focus of HR-IT partnership (August, 2020) | TechTarget. Digitaladoption
THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITAL It's a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace, and it includes all the devices, apps,ON DIGITAL STRATEGY
The reality today is that despite seemingly endless advances and a steady river of emerging technologies, many of the key insights, strategies, and lessons in the digital age have still yet to be discovered.Looking back, we are frankly still early in the pioneering phase of digital, despite significant early ground being claimed and several generations of impressive success stories emerging. A CHECKLIST FOR A MODERN CORE DIGITAL WORKPLACE AND/OR One of the most challenging questions to answer about digital employee experience today is where the center of gravity for it lies. As in, where does the worker, by default, spend most of their time using it.The answer used to be that the worker themselves determines it, often with specific guidance or training, by figuring out how to apply the devices, applications, tools, and platforms to HOW LEADERS CAN ADDRESS THE CHALLENGES OF DIGITAL 2015 marks ten years in which I've been working in the trenches with organizations at a leadership level to drive some form of major change that intertwines technology, networks, and people. Back in the early days it consisted mostly of the novel and heady topics of the Web 2.0 revolution. As things matured and the USING ONLINE COMMUNITY FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION The community as a whole becomes a massive learning repository, a sort of self-documenting and emergent MOOC for digital transformation adapted to the organization, with lessons learned and best practices culled by facilitators and spread to change agents. Empowerment. A community of transformation spreads knowledge, resources, know-how,and
HOW IT CAN CHANGE FOR THE DIGITAL ERA AND WHAT LEADERS CAN I've recently come to believe that we're at a watershed moment in technology as it's applied to business. The aging, creaky model of centralized IT departments has been increasingly challenged by waves of internal and external competition that it's never had to face. It started with the outsourcing wave but picked up irresistible momentumwith
HOW ORGANIZATIONS CAN ADDRESS THE CHALLENGES OF MODERN It's now clear to me that we must take bold new steps if we are to truly improve the state of workforce collaboration in most organizations. As the majority of us are doing it today, digital collaboration is largely stuck in the doldrums. The known issues are numerous: The tools themselves are either too complex, SEEKING A MODERN FOUNDATION FOR THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE The second event is a Webcast of my latest research with Jive Software’s Gili Guri-Mill where I’ll explore why the enterprise social network is emerging at the leading candidate for the foundation of the digital workplace. This will be broadcast on September 15th, 2016 at 10am PT/1pm ET, and I’ll be taking questions towards theend.
ON DIGITAL STRATEGY
Open Collaboration is the Most Strategic Model. I’ll be very clear then as to the core lesson here: By default the single best model for digital communication and collaboration — and the one that produces the most human engagement and the richest outcomes — is ABOUT | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, enterprise architect, transformation consultant, futurist, analyst and in-demand keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in customer experience, digital workplace, technology strategy, and enterprise IT. Dion is currently VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research where he heads WHAT ARE THE REQUIRED SKILLS FOR TODAY’S DIGITAL WORKFORCENECESSARY SKILLS FOR COLLABORATIONCOLLABORATION SKILLS CHECKLISTDIGITAL COLLABORATION SERVICEDIGITAL COLLABORATION TOOLEXAMPLES OF COLLABORATION SKILLSTEAMWORK AND COLLABORATION SKILLS Next-generation organizations will actively work to reduce needless activities like excessive meetings by creating required time for the strategic activities of acquisition, management, and sense-making of digital knowledge. These skills are foundational to adapting more swiftly and organically to rapidly changing operating environments. THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITAL It's a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace, and it includes all the devices, apps, DESIGNING THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE FOR THE END-TO-END As digital becomes instrumental to virtually every aspect of how we do our work in organizations today, two parallel and closely related concerns have joined the industry discussion. These two concerns, workforce engagement (which technology can very much help with) and the employee journey, have risen as urgent topics and joined the overall conversation about FOUR STRATEGIC FRAMEWORKS FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Less of a framework and more of a description of the transformation journey from silos of function (marketing, sales, delivery, operations, customer service, R&D/innovation) to the three main experiences that must result from a successful digital transformation. Right now, customer experience is the focus, with employee experiencea distant
IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, CULTURE CHANGE GOES HAND IN I've spent a lot of time in the last few years identifying the best approaches for that urgent enterprise topic of our time, digital transformation. When I first started, I often looked to top examples of organizations that have started the transition and made good progress (see sample case studies below.) More recently I've derived HOW SHOULD ORGANIZATIONS ACTUALLY GO ABOUT DIGITAL This is now the question that is top of mind in a large number of enterprises today, as speeding up adaptation to rapidly evolving digital markets is now not just a requirement to grow today, but increasingly to survive.. This is not incautious language and I’ve been pointing to the relatively urgent data for several years: One major slip as organizations fully digitize their workforces HOW IT AND THE ROLE OF THE CIO IS CHANGING IN THE ERA OF Here are other essential stories of CIOs realizing IT in new, more decentralized, collaborative, and bottom-up ways: AstraZeneca. CIO David Smoley remade IT at the pharmaceutical giant to be a learning and collaborative organization focused on the customer and technical leadership, he recommends, “that, in addition to embracing technology, they better understand the business, focus THE RISE OF THE 4TH PLATFORM: PERVASIVE COMMUNITY, DATA These days it's still pretty common to talk about social business, mobility, analytics (especially when it's called big data), cloud, and the Internet of Things -- SMACT is the current acronym for all this -- as on the agenda of key digital improvements underway in the typical enterprise. While many organizations have executed solid startsON DIGITAL STRATEGY
Open Collaboration is the Most Strategic Model. I’ll be very clear then as to the core lesson here: By default the single best model for digital communication and collaboration — and the one that produces the most human engagement and the richest outcomes — is ABOUT | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Dion Hinchcliffe is an internationally recognized business strategist, enterprise architect, transformation consultant, futurist, analyst and in-demand keynote speaker. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in customer experience, digital workplace, technology strategy, and enterprise IT. Dion is currently VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research where he heads WHAT ARE THE REQUIRED SKILLS FOR TODAY’S DIGITAL WORKFORCENECESSARY SKILLS FOR COLLABORATIONCOLLABORATION SKILLS CHECKLISTDIGITAL COLLABORATION SERVICEDIGITAL COLLABORATION TOOLEXAMPLES OF COLLABORATION SKILLSTEAMWORK AND COLLABORATION SKILLS Next-generation organizations will actively work to reduce needless activities like excessive meetings by creating required time for the strategic activities of acquisition, management, and sense-making of digital knowledge. These skills are foundational to adapting more swiftly and organically to rapidly changing operating environments. THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITAL It's a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace, and it includes all the devices, apps, DESIGNING THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE FOR THE END-TO-END As digital becomes instrumental to virtually every aspect of how we do our work in organizations today, two parallel and closely related concerns have joined the industry discussion. These two concerns, workforce engagement (which technology can very much help with) and the employee journey, have risen as urgent topics and joined the overall conversation about FOUR STRATEGIC FRAMEWORKS FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Less of a framework and more of a description of the transformation journey from silos of function (marketing, sales, delivery, operations, customer service, R&D/innovation) to the three main experiences that must result from a successful digital transformation. Right now, customer experience is the focus, with employee experiencea distant
IN DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, CULTURE CHANGE GOES HAND IN I've spent a lot of time in the last few years identifying the best approaches for that urgent enterprise topic of our time, digital transformation. When I first started, I often looked to top examples of organizations that have started the transition and made good progress (see sample case studies below.) More recently I've derived HOW SHOULD ORGANIZATIONS ACTUALLY GO ABOUT DIGITAL This is now the question that is top of mind in a large number of enterprises today, as speeding up adaptation to rapidly evolving digital markets is now not just a requirement to grow today, but increasingly to survive.. This is not incautious language and I’ve been pointing to the relatively urgent data for several years: One major slip as organizations fully digitize their workforces HOW IT AND THE ROLE OF THE CIO IS CHANGING IN THE ERA OF Here are other essential stories of CIOs realizing IT in new, more decentralized, collaborative, and bottom-up ways: AstraZeneca. CIO David Smoley remade IT at the pharmaceutical giant to be a learning and collaborative organization focused on the customer and technical leadership, he recommends, “that, in addition to embracing technology, they better understand the business, focus THE RISE OF THE 4TH PLATFORM: PERVASIVE COMMUNITY, DATA These days it's still pretty common to talk about social business, mobility, analytics (especially when it's called big data), cloud, and the Internet of Things -- SMACT is the current acronym for all this -- as on the agenda of key digital improvements underway in the typical enterprise. While many organizations have executed solid starts WORKSHOPS | ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Workshops can be added to the day before or after a conference and can generate significant additional revenue. 10-20% of conference attendees will typically add paid workshops to their agenda. Private workshops can be sized from 5-50 people, with 8-12 an optimal number. Dion Hinchcliffe Delivering Workshop at CITE World. IT’S TIME TO THINK ABOUT THE POST-2020 EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE The Post-2020 Employee Experience Has No Silos, No Barriers, No Limits. As part of this, I’ve synthesized what I believe is a unified view of what the post-2020 digital employee experience stack looks like, given the pandemic, latest industry trends, and other factors I’ll explore soon. Given the scope of the entire employeeexperience
THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITAL It's a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace, and it includes all the devices, apps, WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF WORK? The management theory — or more likely theories, plural, as there are probably several good ways of thinking about it as I’ve recently explored — for the future of work is starting to emerge. The same with team, department, company-wide, and mass collaboration. Then there is the collaborative economy that is genuinely remaking very HOW IT CAN CHANGE FOR THE DIGITAL ERA AND WHAT LEADERS CAN I've recently come to believe that we're at a watershed moment in technology as it's applied to business. The aging, creaky model of centralized IT departments has been increasingly challenged by waves of internal and external competition that it's never had to face. It started with the outsourcing wave but picked up irresistible momentumwith
SEEKING A MODERN FOUNDATION FOR THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE The second event is a Webcast of my latest research with Jive Software’s Gili Guri-Mill where I’ll explore why the enterprise social network is emerging at the leading candidate for the foundation of the digital workplace. This will be broadcast on September 15th, 2016 at 10am PT/1pm ET, and I’ll be taking questions towards theend.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT MAKING ENTERPRISE SOCIAL NETWORKS It's a little hard to believe that it's been over ten years now since the first early enterprise social networks (ESN) emerged on the market to make their initial forays into our organizations. They showed us then -- and I believe even more now today -- the bright newpossibilities for
RESTRUCTURING THE C-SUITE FOR DIGITAL BUSINESS: THE FUTURE I've noticed lately what appears to be an emerging trend in marketing and communications leadership in some large companies. Specifically, the positions of chief marketing officer (CMO) and chief communications officer (CCO) are sometimes being consolidated into a single role, even in very large enterprises. Such consolidation has already happened at PG&E, Walgreens, and Citi, ENTERPRISES AND ECOSYSTEMS: WHY DIGITAL NATIVES ARE Why is it that so many traditional companies with an enormous wealth of assets largely fail to transform them for the digital era? By assets here, I mean established customer base, closely held relationships with trading partners, mountains of data and IP, as well as their bread and butter, the actual products and services they DEFINING THE NEXT GENERATION ENTERPRISE FOR 2014 Many of you know that over the last several years I've tried to make the case that most organizations are currently falling behind the advancing pace of technological change. That business is so centered around technology today is the reason why addressing this has become a top competitive issue. Becoming better adapted to tech change ON DIGITAL STRATEGY | DION HINCHCLIFFE Notes on Internet and Business ConvergenceSearch:
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HOW WORK WILL EVOLVE IN A DIGITAL POST-PANDEMIC SOCIETY April 15, 2020 Leave a comment The current outbreak of COVID-19 is stress testing our institutions, infrastructure, governments, and societies more than any event in most of our lifetimes. We have to go all the way back to the two World Wars to find similar precedents. Yet, as our businesses and personal lives are profoundly impacted, some of us can also perceive great forces of change in motion that offer us hope for positive and important new outcomes that we might influence. The realization has also set in that we won’t likely be able to roll things back to how they recently were — at least any time soon — so we must now look at what is likely to be the next new normal,
as it was famously known as during the 2007-2008 financial downturn (and which now sadly looks increasingly minor by comparison.) In the last month and a half, I’ve been exploring how organizations must rapidly adapt themselves to the pandemic as most of our organizations now consist purely of digital workers connected over our global networks. As many of us in the digital workplace and employee experience community have noted oflate ,
there are now major opportunities to follow-up on significant yet often slow or stalled transformations of human-centered work. But first we must face our current situation and likely trajectory. PROFOUND DISRUPTION OF WORK IS HERE There’s just no avoiding it: The disruption we are facing today is as profound as it is pervasive. Yet I deeply believe it also offers an increasingly fertile and robust landscape into which we can drive meaningful and sustained change for good. Our timing must be careful and the thinking behind it — combined with effective action at scale — both crisp and clear, albeit real challenges in our fast-changingtimes.
There’s also no denying that how we’ve worked before is simply gone. Something much better than what we currently have must replace our current unwieldy situation for many of us: Weeks long slogs through endless video calls, tiring teleconferences at all hours, with our team chat windows scrolling mindlessly past our gaze. We can and must now create a much better design for our current working realities. Whether you will focus on remote work, more quarantine-friendly physical facilities, or a comprehensive rethink of the modern enterprise for being near 100% digital, we will have to go as deep as the core ideas that underpin work itself.
We must also — to make it much easier to evolve going forward — start designing our workplaces and our work itself much more as a contemporary digital product in an ongoing and continuous exercise of collaboration and co-creation. I once asked in Designing the NewEnterprise
,
“how do we adapt sustainably to constant change?” Now the question is also, “how do we adapt sustainably to large disruptive change?” Answering these big questions will require profound and outside-the-box thinking. Our very foundations are in the midst straining. We now live in an era where even the traditionalnation-state
as well as the new global order both seem threatened. Answers to how we will thrive in a post-modern pandemic-stricken world seem stubbornly hard to find. Neither model seems sufficiently effective at providing adequately coordinated leadership or proactive response. If we move down from the macro level of the global stage down to the size of our organizations (corporations, state/local governments, associations, non-profits, etc.) and other related but long-standing business structures like unions, partnerships, alliances, consortiums, and so on, we see that these too are now struggling to help their constituents in many cases. THE WAYS FORWARD ARE UNFAMILIAR AND UNKNOWN, BUT NOT FOR LONG Many better connected and easier to operate digital alternatives — at least in our currently locked down global state — do now exist, but seem either rather immature and/or unproven in comparison. These include global digital communities (yes, Facebook, and others), the larger and older open source groups/projects, and digital communities like LinkedIn and Github do seem to show that massively scaled communities can share information, powerful ideas, and help each other in compelling new ways, as many of us have long hoped. While there are plenty of downsides to these too, because the pandemic resistance of digital networks is outstanding, no other workable new modes exist. We’re now entering a phase where we must begin to plan for post-pandemic. This does not mean going back to where we were. It cannot, because we now know the reality of the impact of a return of a new pandemic or a newly mutated coronavirus: _It’s simply irresponsible and unacceptable to go back to the entirely too fragile and so easily-disrupted operating models of the pre-COVID-19 world._ What does this suddenly urgent near-future of work look like you ask? No one has all the answers, but the good news is that we’re about to discover very quickly what is working and what isn’t in the vast global living laboratory of #suddenlyremote.
From my conversations the last few weeks with CIOs, my fellow futurists and thought leaders in the Future of Work, digital workplace leads, and employee experience groups (mostly in IT, but some in HR), there’s a recent but increasingly broad swing from the tactical, as in just getting everyone onboard with the basics of working remotely, to the strategic, where we look at where we must now go, both in-pandemic and post-pandemic, and quite possibly the next pandemic. HOW WORK WILL EVOLVE From this vantage point, which I am very fortunate to have in the industry, I can see a number of likely outcomes that will allow us to take a precarious economic reopening and flailing early growth and turn it into a stronger story of resilient resurgence, no matter whathappens:
* DESIGNING FOR LOSS OF CONTROL.
By taking advantage of the tendency of systems and external agents to use an organization’s people, ideas, resources, systems, and data to do new and interesting things, organizations can deliberately create thousands of emergent outcomes at scale, many of which they have a stake in (see: platforms, ecosystems, etc.) The raw components are well known and understood for making this happen. Now it is an imperative to drive rapid recovery and growth. * A STRONG PREFERENCE FOR TOOLS WITH EXPONENTIAL POTENTIAL AND LEVERAGE. The pandemic catches us at a time of exponential change, and is further driving it. We simply can’t fight exponential change with yesterday’s linear tools. Organizations now need access to near-instant response to large events at scale. This is only possible with capabilities that can respond in kind. This means everything from mass decentralized automation and AI enablement to using digital communities and social networks as our primary organizationalstructures.
* THE RISE OF FULLY OPEN AND AGILE NEW OPERATING MODELS. The biggest question is whether our traditional institutions lead the world out of the pandemic, or will citizens around the globe come together and opt instead for something different using our global networks? We’ve seen the inexorable shift in agile methods in recent years, which came from key insights and experiences in the technology world, and which I’ve long noted has begun to infiltrate the broader world ofbusiness itself
.
The envelope of agile has expanded to something we now call DevOps , and that envelope will continue to expand and merge with mass digital collaboration models that now existing within the realms online forums, enterprise social networks, and team chat channels: Communities of practice, communities of
interest , and
now, _communities of business_, a notion I’ll expand on soon as I am currently collecting growing evidence for them. * SELF-ORGANIZATION, SELF-SERVICE, AND PULL-BASED MODELS FOR REORGANIZATION, RESTRUCTURING, REBUILDING, REVIVING, AND THRIVING. The single most powerful model for work is humans collaborating together in open, transparent, and self-organizing processes. As I’ve often strongly encouraged businesses and people: Let the network do the work.
There is no time in modern history where this concept is more important. It’s how we’ll each have enough access to resources, skills, ideas, and capabilities to do almost anything that needs to ne done. We’re already seeing things like this happen such as theformation of the
Open COVID Pledge to mobilize invaluable IP quickly to respond to the pandemic in any and all ways necessary. The list of now free,
but previously commercial, services available to help individuals and businesses is impressive as is the list of initiatives to help businesses most impacted. Again, all these resources have digital communities or capabilities at their core. I also predict that our digital communities of citizens, workers, and organizations will be the single most influential and important resources that we have in surmounting the challenges of the current pandemic. It’s an easy prediction, because that’s largely all that government, society, organizations, and our institutions are at this moment. While there are badly needed and greatly appreciated people out there in the real world still growing our food, staffing our hospitals, and keeping the peace, these still represent only a tiny fraction of the total sum of our global cognitive power, operating capacity, and economic capability. The rest, for better or worse, has just gone almost completely digital. We absolutely require the best ways of operating in this new reality. My point is that we largely have them, but the hard work remains to adopt, adapt, and succeed with them. It will be one of the most profoundly positive changes in human history, unleashing untold autonomy, human diversity, bold new ideas, dramatically transformative action, as well as human freedom and potential. Or not. The choice is ours to make, right now.ADDITIONAL READING
When Our Organizations Became Networks The Challenging State of Employee Experience and Digital WorkplaceToday
Revisiting How to Cultivate Connected Organizations in an Age ofCoronavirus
My 2020 predictions for the Future of Work My recent video interview with Bjoern Negelmann about these topics for Digital Work Disruption Filed under Analysis , Digital Transformation,
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REVISITING HOW TO CULTIVATE CONNECTED ORGANIZATIONS IN AN AGEOF CORONAVIRUS
March 19, 2020 1 Comment Looking back at it from the vantage point of the current coronavirus pandemic, it’s clear now that most organizations missed a golden opportunity about five to seven years ago. This was the height of industry discussion around and worldwide business implementationof
enterprise social networks, a
leading form of internal online community. Known in shorthand as the ‘ESN’, this emerging class of communication and mass engagement platform was inspired by the runaway growth and success of the global social media revolution.
The ESN focused on creating a living, breathing organization-widedigital fabric
of open connections, conversations, knowledge sharing, and meaningful collaboration that was as egalitarian as it was eminently useful. Optimism was rife back then and progress seemed tantalizingly close in resolving the many issues with the aging model of corporate organizational hierarchies. There’s no doubt about it: The vision for the enterprise social network was as utopian as it was grand. I know, because I can count myself as one of the leading proponents of people-connected technologies back in that age. I even wrote a popular book on the subject, when the management and design theory behind it was known as social business.
But the ESN revolution was also grounded in using technology to go well beyond the limiting constraints of the real world when it comes to distance, time, experience, or access to leaders or subject matter experts. The ESN flourished in many organizations, and they still do, though I notice a distinctly more subdued tone today when I talk to ESN owners, practitioners, and the specialized staff that help them run well, community managers.
Back in those days, we eventually accumulated enough experience to know what worked and what didn’t: It was easy to roll out the tools and hard to shift the culture and skills, but as an industry, we largely learned how to make them successful.
For those that wanted it, a virtual organization of vibrant digital connections formed a network across the company that became a central conduit for learning, knowledge capture/management, operations at scale, vital peer-based support, and so much more. However, the ESN was different enough that it required strong stakeholders and passionate evangelists who would rarely leave its side or tire. Since the heady early days, I’ve noticed that ESNs tend to come and go if their sponsors and/or champions move on. That’s not to say there haven’t been and don’t continue to be many success stories. There are. THE NEED FOR RESILIENT DIGITAL COMMUNITIES HAS COME ROARING BACK Enter the coronavirus. The dasher of hope and changer of worlds in so many ways. There have been few times in history where the workplace has been so thoroughly disrupted as it has been today by COVID-19. The workforces of virtually every organization globally is either on a mandatory work at home policy or soon will be. My analysis of what to do in the early days of being suddenly remote is easily one of the most popular things I’ve written in recentyears.
To say most organizations are not ready to become “suddenly remote”, as the phrase of art has become, is an understatement. In short, organizations around the world have _essentially been physically disbanded until further notice_. This is an incalculable shift. Our Internet connections are now our main lifeline by far to our work lives, to our colleagues, and to our careers. It’s as isolating for many, as it is freeing for others. As it turns out, remote work is also a profoundly different way of functioning in our jobs that is inherently less social (unless we substantially augment it to be otherwise), more siloed, and disconnected than most of us are prepared for. Especially when we have to work remotely all the time, for days, weeks, or months on end, which is the reality at this time. THE RETURN OF THE ENTERPRISE SOCIAL NETWORK In the current period of prolonged dislocation from our old work lives, wouldn’t it be incredibly useful if we already had a robust digital support structure in place? One that we’ve long since carefully crafted and built up from the connections of people that we’ve met either physically or virtually. While we actually have that in the form of our consumer social networks (or at least many of us do), it’s almost completely out of context for our workplaceneeds.
It’s a shortcoming of our own making. Our attempts to train workers to be digitally savvy has had long and sustained gaps because we’ve been able to lean on our legacy physical skills and environments. In the past, I’ve attempted to describe the necessary digital skills to help workers adapt to this new work more gradually. They are all predicated on building modern social capital,
meaning have a broad, diverse, and strong network of connections to people in today’s modern operating environment: The global digital networks that infuse everything today. _Yet in the context of our work at least, most of us are now completely lacking this social capital, these connections, or a virtual community around us, just when we need it most._ Instead, for those organizations that didn’t make the determined and sustained efforts to do the hard work of creating an enterprise social network (or equivalent), the workers who have been tossed overnight into entirely remote working situations are finding it hard going. Their familiar communal work environment is gone. Their outdated tools don’t keep them plugged into the pulse of the organization. In fact, most workers badly need the resilient and vibrant connective tissue of an ESN, with all its rich user profiles, relationships between far flung connections, countless groups of local experts, reams of searchable open knowledge, and the deep insight that all these can provide to step in for the shockingly rapid loss of our physical world of work. ESN/COMMUNITY PRACTITIONERS AND EXECUTIVE LEADERS: IT’S TIME TOSEIZE THE DAY
To practitioners, I’ve started making it clear that this is a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime and historic opportunity to make your enterprise social network save the day when it comes to grounding and delivering a healthy remote organization. An effective ESN can connecting the organization back to itself far better than older tools by focusing on returning and then improving both the cultural “dial tone” and daily bustle of the organization. The practical benefits are significant: Actual outcome-based business impact by improving operations, productivity, and employee engagement. So this is your time to shine, whether you now need to develop an ESN and the communities within it, or supercharge the one that you have. For business leaders, now is the time to put your organization on a modern digital platform that is far more resilient to disruption and that will both modernize it and make it much more effective. I encourage you to look at the baseline results you’re likely to get, which was published in the MIT Sloan Management Review. Worst case is that you’ll achieve about a 25% productivity increase for yourinvestment
,
which is fairly modest compared to CRM or ERP systems. You will however be required to invest in more staff than is typical for a traditional IT solution (the why and how many is here,
but it’s not large compared to major productivity losses for remote workers without a strong supporting network.) Don’t wait. Support the ESN and online community champions trying to help you. For both, this is the time to learn that advanced preparedness for going all digital is critical. We live in exponential times of change, and this also seems to mean large and more frequent disruptions. Those with the healthiest, best connected, and engaged digital networks of workers will experience the least disarray and breakdown when major events like coronavirus take place. Let’s learn from not making the most of these powerful tools the first time around. It’s now time to fully commit to building the best possible connected organization fornext time around.
FINAL NOTE: Before you ask me about why ESNs and not team chat apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams, it’s because the ESN scales conversations and engagement up to the size of the enterprise. Almost all orgs are already using Slack and Teams, and it gives them a much narrower and far more limited view of what’s happening. In an ESN, all contributions are visible by default across the whole organization, content types are more sophisticated, and as you can see below in additional reading, they can be used for advance change processes like enterprise-wide digital transformation. ESNs are strategic. Team chat is useful, but tactical.ADDITIONAL READING
Using Online Community for Digital Transformation More Evidence Online Community is Central to the Future of Work My Future of Work Trends for 2020 (with Video) Filed under Analysis ,Digital Workplace
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A CHECKLIST FOR A MODERN CORE DIGITAL WORKPLACE AND/OR INTRANET February 11, 2020 1 Comment One of the most challenging questions to answer about digital employee experience today is where the center of gravity for it lies. As in, where does the worker, by default, spend most of their time using it.
The answer used to be that the worker themselves determines it, often with specific guidance or training, by figuring out how to apply the devices, applications, tools, and platforms to which they are given access, to their daily job. This self-guidance generally defines the typical digital workplace journey even today, and constitutes the sort of benign neglect, throw-it-over-the-wall situation that we current find in many organizations. Knowing where the center of gravity should actually be has become important lately for several strategic reasons. First, it’s very useful in identifying where digital workplace teams should spend the majority of their design and analytics time so they can ensure what they provide works well and is optimized for the purposes to which its currently being used. Second, because the digital employee experience has become so fragmented and siloed that just finding and navigating apps, data/docs, channels, and experiences has become its own significant overhead, it allows us to identify where we should be integrating said side journeys into acommon hub.
Finally, it just gives us a better operating lens to the digital life of the employee and the business: We can see how to better situate IT within the broader worker journey to produce the best outcomes, onboarding and cross training becomes simplified through a more standardized user experience and thus faster/easier, which means satisfaction and retention becomes higher, adoption/effectiveness of digital workplace investments is greater,
and so on. Why? Because this lens provides a more systematic and overarching view that aims at overall stakeholder needs better. It also avoids the traditional point solution myopia that makes it hard to see the big picture or understand properly how an IT system actually contributes to the business (a surprisingly thorny problem.) A number of virtual “places” have come and (largely) gone over the years that attempt to partially address the center of gravity issue. That’s because of the significant payoff in doing so compared to focusing on less traveled — off dramatically less, areas of the digital workplace (_see_: SharePoint team site graveyards, largely abandoned intranets, and almost useless search engines.) There’s also a lot of edge IT to sort through: The average large enterprise has, to the surprise of most I find, between 1,000 and 3,000 applications that run the business. But in my experience over the last couple of decades, although the number of apps keeps growing substantially, most employees only use a small subset on a regular basis, usually a foundational set that almost every employees uses, then a different set of apps based ontheir work persona.
Currently, my rule of thumbs is that core employee experience can be addressed by putting the hundred or so core apps (give or take 50, depending on the enterprise), as well docs, comms channels, and systems of engagement, into a more centralized experience. Yes, the future of IT is distributed,
but experiences are not. They are the vital new outcome-centered,cohesive journeys
that take workers through their role-based processes, tasks, and helps them get to value-based outcomes as quickly as possible. I would strongly suggest that if we are to see any dramatic improvements to the digital workplace, it will require moving beyond a largely accidental one to a more deliberately designed one,
albeit a digital environment where the edges and even much of the center are shaped, personalized, and customized easily by IT, the worker, the local team, and managers as a collaborative effort. While parts of this notion are now gaining broader acceptance, what’s even better is that we’re now seeing a generation of digital workplace tools emerge that actually enable it (I’ll explore these soon.) Thus, I am now being asked what does such a core experience look like? How does it manifest itself? Is it a Web desktop, smart intranet, a digital experience platform, or a converged mobile app? Is all of these or what? This is what we’re collectively trying to determine, and has been the crux of the issues and roadblocks for so many digital workplace teams of late. KEY FEATURES OF A MODERN DIGITAL WORKPLACE Having been on a number of such enterprise-wide digital workplace design efforts in recent years, I can attest to what such a core digital workplace should consist of. Borrowing from my projects with clients, industry research, and analysis, here is what — at an absolute minimum — I believe must be the capabilities and features of any modern digital workplace hub or center of gravity: * A central experience accessible from any digital environment theworker will use
* A consistent usability model to the degree possible given a highly heterogeneous user experience within the hub * Foundational feature set (file/doc sharing, content management, task management, collaboration, comms, online community) * A straightforward and easy-to-learn information architecture,variable by persona
* A way to define personas with easy matching to unique branches in the experience, IA, central experience * Global search and discovery that works * Administration and community management features * Robust 3rd party software integrations and app store * Online training and digital adoption features,
native or add-on
* Easy-to-add business software integrations (for custom built,internal LOB apps)
* Customization options for branding, internal whitelabeling, etc. * Datacenter locations and choice (logic and data residency) * Deployment options (on-premises, cloud, hybrid) * Directory integration (people and groups) includingmulti-directory
* A persona mapping tool and/or assessment process to take the employee directory and assign workers to personas * A rich ecosystem of customers, partners, ISVs * Extensibility and integrations via modern microservices/master graph, APIs and SDKs * Governance and compliance controls * Native-quality mobile access * Personalization features (manual or algorithmic, AI) * Low code/no code experience and workflow creation by IT orbusiness users
* A digital studio to design task specific end-to-end business processes across multiple apps * Smart assistive AI across ad hoc cross app usage and workflows * Reporting tools and workstream/outcome analytics, acrossintegrated apps
* Next gen interfaces including voice input, voice/video transcription, smart assistants, gesture control, VR/AR * Scalability and robustness * Security and privacy features * No restrictions on who the worker can collaborate with (any audience, inside or outside the org) * Data migration/import from older/previous platforms The details of what some of these features actually consist of is an exercise for broader industry discussion, which I plan to continue collaboratively online. But it’s safe to say that I think most practitioners would support the majority of what’s listed here. However, I would go a step forther further and underscore that each and every feature is _the absolute minimum acceptable set_ today to achieve an effective digital workplace and employee experience.
THE NEXT DIGITAL WORKPLACE WILL NOT RESEMBLE TODAY’S I also believe large forces and missed opportunities are at work, given the rapid growth we’re seeing in shadow IT for digitalworkplace
,
the relatively dire state of the overarching tech-enabled employee experience (workers are generally just clamoring for the rudiments toactually work well
,
and only 22% think they have a good employee experience at all reports Deloitte). The implication is that most enterprises are not even delivering the fundamentals well, much less zeroing in on the right feature sets that will move them into the future. Instead we are focusing on isolated, over-centralized, one-size-fits-all content-based experiences, and neglect the overall condition of the journey. Instead, we must shift focus to more holistic and connected app-based experiences explicitly designed to deliver the meaningful and effective user experiences that we so deeply wish for and desire. For the better, the approach of rolling out a largely disconnected grab bag of apps from a checklist is no longer a viable strategy for tech-enabled employee experience. Instead, the modern digital workplace is becoming much more of a common fabric upon which we can design, contextualize, analyze, and optimize the worker experience. It is also highly malleable, 1:1 personalized, and hyperintegrated. Finally, this new smarter digital workplace is anticipatory, predictive, journey-based, data-driven, user-obsessed, and design-informed, including, perhaps most importantly, explicit designfor loss of control
.
ADDITIONAL READING
The Challenging State of Employee Experience and Digital WorkplaceToday
A Comprehensive Overview of Modern Digital Workplace Trends andEmerging Practices
My Predictions for the Future of Work in 2020 Filed under collaboration,
Digital Workplace
, Strategy
, The Enterprise
, The Future of
Work
THE CHALLENGING STATE OF EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE AND DIGITALWORKPLACE TODAY
January 21, 2020 1 Comment It’s a very difficult time to be in the business of providing a digital employee experience today. By digital employee experience, I mean the totality of the end-to-end digital touchpoints that a worker uses to get their job done. This view is also sometimes called the digital workplace,
and it includes all the devices, apps, and data that a worker employs in their day-to-day work, whether it’s company provided or not (as we’ll see, an increasingly fraught topic.) But digital workplace is now seen by many, including by myself, as an inadequate and incomplete construct. Certainly, it consists of the local intranet, computer desktop, productivity tools, enterprise search engine(s), collaboration apps, and line of business systems, most of which was acquired and deployed with almost no thought to how they should fit together as an overall digital journey. In other words, though I now see more and more digital workplace groups within organizations who are actually in charge of it, the reality is that we’re a long way from a consistent, seamless, effective, widely adopted, and well-designed digital workplace. THE ISSUES IN REALIZING AN EFFECTIVE DIGITAL JOURNEY FOR WORKERS There are a complex and interrelated set of factors on why digital workplace is in reality very much on the ropes in many, if not most, organizations. In my view, the critical factors are: * EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE IS PROVING TO BE A MORE COMPLETE AND EFFECTIVE VIEW OF DIGITAL ENABLEMENT,
BUT COMES IN AT A HARDER-TO-ADDRESS AND RATHER DISRUPTIVE ANGLE. The employee experience takes into account a much more complete view (physical, cultural, and technological) of what employees should haveaddressed
in their digitally-enabled work lives. Yet this view, while likely to produce substantially better outcomes if it’s realized through this lens, is highly problematic in that it clearly straddles at least two major organizational silos: HR (the people component) and IT (the digital side) in order to achieve, plus some other groups as well, including everyone from facilities to compliance and regulatory. Getting all of these groups to work together at the same time — and with the same vision — is very challenging. * APPS HAVE PROLIFERATED BY THE MILLIONS AND BECOME HYPERSPECIALIZED. Every function in the business (marketing, sales, operations, legal, HR, etc) are getting highly targeted apps that they can use to address their work much better than the general purpose, one-size-fits-all that IT much prefers (for cost, manageability, governance, etc.) Consumer and enterprise app stores are filled with countless solutions that will do exactly what you need for an individual task. The supply side of IT has become so vast and large that it’s almost impossible to be a departmental conduit for it (like IT is supposed to be) or design up-to-date experiences around this galaxy-sized pool of choices. * THE CLOUD (ESPECIALLY SAAS) AND MOBILE APP STORES HAVE DEFINITIVELY DISRUPTED IT, CREATING VAST AND RAPIDLY SHIFTING SHADOW IT DOMINIONS ON THE EDGES OF ORGANIZATIONS. While ERP, HR benefits systems, e-mail, and the proverbial cafeteria menu/corporate HQ driving directions pages on the intranet don’t seem to be affected, everything else, starting with CRM and going deep into every corporate function, satisfying near every user requirement, whatever it is, for cheap (often for free), available _right now_ at a button click, has upended the game. Marketing departments are almost certainly the leading example of this: The excellent Scott Brinker has been tracking the vast explosion of apps in this category, going from about 150 in 2011 to a staggering 7,000+ in 2019.
What’s more, the churn in the category is astonishing, with 83% of marketers ripping and replacing key apps each year.
Other functions are seeing similar proliferation of choice as I’veshown in the past
(and they’re often very good options indeed), though not quite to the degree that marketing groups are experiencing. * A STRONG DESIRE AND LEGITIMATE NEED TO HAVE A MORE INTEGRATED, CENTRALIZED, SIMPLIFIED, AND STREAMLINED SET OF DIGITAL WORKPLACE TOOLS. The above trends are driving a strong inclination — even an imperative in many organizations I speak with — to create a center of gravity for digital work. This is where apps, data, and people are brought together as much as it makes sense and where functionality can be more easily accessed and used (and searched), without switching between hundreds of apps or importing/export data all day or struggling to get co-workers to join and adopt yet another new app, service, channel, or collaboration tool. I’ve called this the digital workplace hub,
and something like it is needed, though arguments have been made (by me as well) that mobile devices and their operating systems are ultimately heading in this direction. Enterprise apps such as Slack, Box, and others have increasingly managed to create large numbers of integrations to business systems that workers can use, though said workers are not actually trained for the most part how to benefit from or use these emerging hubs. * DESIGN IS ABSENT FROM THE OVERALL DIGITAL EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE. We simply haven’t used employee experience as the lens to consider what we should do, and moreover, we haven’t had the tools or composable apps to achieve a more designed experience. With the widespread riseof microservices
and easy-to-integrate online apps via APIs, this is now all changing. We are now able to carve out and bring together the features, experiences, and journeys from most of our IT systems into a more comprehensible design that’s better designed (though, never finished and very much co-designed with individual workers, who already do most of their employee experience design day-to-day. * THE NEED FOR DIGITAL WORKPLACE, AND CONSEQUENTLY NOW EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE, TO REFLECT A WIDER RANGE OF AN EMPLOYEE NEEDS, TO DRIVE OVERALL ENGAGEMENT, WHICH DIGITAL TOOLS ARE ACTUALLY VERY CAPABLE OFDELIVERING
.
I often say that nothing is worse that hiring smart people and then giving them poor tools to do their job, or just as bad, a terrible overall employee experience. We simply have to do much better with design of our employee experiences. * LIMITED TOOLS, PLATFORMS, MODELS, OR PRIOR EXPERIENCE TO DEALING WITH ALL OF THIS IN OUR INDUSTRY. To be clear, we are in uncharted waters here. Never has the digital workplace or employee experience landscape ever been anything close to as large or complex as it is now, and it will only get worse for most. While I am tracking some early lessons learned, new tooling, and initial planning/design frameworks, we are in early days. As with most of digital, we will all have to get very good at complexity management at high scale. * HIGH LEVELS OF TECHNICAL DEBT AND INSUFFICIENT WILLPOWER OR SUPPORT TO COMPREHENSIVELY ADDRESS THE CORE ISSUES. I’ve talked about issues of ever-faster accumulating technical debt before,
and it can’t be forgotten how much this hold positive change back. Cloud will help for a while, but new architectures are going to berequired.
HOW WILL WE OVERCOME THESE CHALLENGES? What is IT, and indeed, HR and the whole organizations due to address these very considerable obstacles and headwinds? That is the question. I’ve argued that the methods that we ar led to by the concept of Design for Loss of Control will be key. I believe in this more now, than ever before. People will also be key to this. While cultural change will be the hardest and take the most time, we don’t have to wait for it. Harnessing and enabling change agents who are hungry to improve their local digital workplaces and employee experience will provide a lot of the scale and local change that we need. Other techniques are emerging, such as digital adoptionplatforms
.
I am actually very hopeful that we’ll get to a much better place, but not until we’ve learned a lot of those hard lessons. I’ll be surveying our BT150 digital leaders en masse early this year to see what they’re doing to improve this state of affairs. I’ll release the data when I have it. Until then, we have to take what we’ve already learned to heart and apply it: Use employee experience as the master lens over it all, and use exponential methods to realize it. Collaborate with everyone in our organizations that we’ll need to make it a reality. Measure and improve it often. Be inclusive, and don’t overcontrol. Good luck.ADDITIONAL READING
Creating the Modern Digital Workplace and Employee Experience How to Develop the Minimum Viable Employee Experience Tech Foundation for Employee Experience: An Integrated Stack Filed under Digital Experience, Digital
Workplace ,
Strategy , The
Enterprise , The
Future of Work
FOUR STRATEGIC FRAMEWORKS FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION October 18, 2018 1 Comment Collectively, the world of business and IT just isn’t learning about effective ways to digitally transform nearly as quickly as it could be or should be. However, as we reflecton previous efforts
,
we can begin to see why this is: Lack of good storytelling, inadequate structuring for speed and agility, poor sharing of effective best practices harvested from hard-won industry experiences, or having these lessons collected together into understandable and applicable frameworks that reflect the realities of how hard large scale digitalchange really is.
We almost universally know now we must adapt to the digital future, to change and grow. But _how_ best to do it remains the top question. We’ve also learned along the way there are numerous submergedobstacles
to digital transformation that won’t be denied and must be overcome before we can really even get started. Sometimes, as they say, we must first go slow to go fast later. Stubborn and long-standing issues related to technology like technicaldebt
or poor master data posture,
to name just two, threaten to derail efforts before they even start. Issues related to the nature of people take up the rest, and can sometimes seem intractable. FOUR FRAMEWORKS TO DESCRIBE AND DRIVE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Consequently, in my work advising and/or leading digital transformation efforts, I’ve developed and refined four key frameworks built out of years of repeated use and validation in organizations around the world. These reflect many of the central issues that I believe we’ve learned that we must address and then codified them into a plan that most organizations can execute against. The motivation: I’m asked for what frameworks to use for digital transformation more and more frequently these days. So I thought it would be useful to share them along with some key insights in how they were captured. THE ADAPTABLE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION FRAMEWORK. This originally came from my exploration of the organizational culture issues and long-term journey with digital transformation.
It’s also one of my oldest and most seasoned frameworks. This framework reflects at its core an ongoing cycle of (hopefully, self) disruption, refinement, growth, and renewal, backed by key pillars including culture change, leadership, goals/roadmap, business redesign, communications, education, and skill building. It also makes the key point that emergent innovation is perhaps one of the biggest outcomes, enabled by the key digital era technique of designing forloss of control
,
such as critical strategy of turning your business into an openplatform
that others can build on at scale. A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INITIATION FRAMEWORK. I used to get asked more often than now about how to get started with digital transformation than I do today (as the majority of organizations have already begun in some way.) This framework focuses mostly on the first 100 days of an organization-wide effort and reflects the key activities that must occur. If there is something I’d tweak about this now it’s the “honesty assess” task in the first column. I’d underscore it far more. That’s because most organizations aren’t going far enough in the deeply reflective examination and soul-searching they must conduct early-on at every level to understand what they’re really facing when it comes to digital change and adaptation. This step must be particularly emphasized in the framework or organizations will struggle to even start the journey. Technical debt and master data barriers are just the start on the technology side. Culture, inclination, skill, and talent are bigger issues and are softer human ones that are very challenging to resolve. For many organizations, these obstacles will take far more than 100 days to overcome. Other than that emphasis, I’m pleased with the current state of this framework, even if too many organizations don’t take the cultivating and full-scale activation of change agents nearly to the level theyshould.
A LEADERSHIP FRAMEWORK FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION. More of a process flow view than a prescriptive view on how leadership should go about digital transformation,
this framework is useful for showing how critical it is for executives and digital change leaders are responsible for defining a new business future state, rich in new products and services in the realm of customer experience and digital platform. The major change I’d make today is that recent data now shows that the CEO is now the leader most often involved in driving forward enterprise-wide digital transformation, and I’d position it so in this picture. THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION TARGET MODEL. Less of a framework and more of a description of the transformation journey from silos of function (marketing, sales, delivery, operations, customer service, R&D/innovation) to the three main experiences that must result from a successful digital transformation.
Right now, customer experience is the focus, with employee experience a distant second, but supplier experience is finally bringing up the rear and becoming a genuine conversation. I’d not make many changes to this view based on recent lessons learned, and organizations should take this view deeply to heart in their efforts in digitization. FRAMEWORKS: A LIVING ARTIFACT OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION KNOWLEDGE One unfortunate fact is that organizations often developed or adapt their frameworks from the material they encounter, such as the ones above. But they fail to make it a living artifact that captures lessons learned and teach those that must join in and continue thejourney.
Thus, if there is a lesson learned above all, is that as digital transformation becomes a long-term journey that organizations will remain on as long as they exist, they must do a much better job in capturing, codifying, and spreading the learning of what works and what doesn’t, as it changes and evolves through time. In fact, learning is ultimately the primary activity of digital transformation,
so any successful effort will tend to emphasize it and capture it in their own frameworks.ADDITIONAL READING
The Digital Power Values for The New C-Suite: The Modern Mindset of the CEO, CIO, CMO, CDO, CCO Why IT Leaders Struggle with Digital Transformation The Leadership Challenges of Digital Transformation | The Conference Board Filed under Analysis , Digital Transformation,
Strategy , The
Enterprise
WHY MICROSERVICES WILL BECOME A CORE BUSINESS STRATEGY FORMOST ORGANIZATIONS
September 7, 2018 1 Comment As an industry, we have collectively returned to that eternal debate about what constitutes a largely technical evolution versus when an important digital idea becomes a full-blown business trend. This has happened before with Web sites, e-commerce, mobile applications, social media, and other well-known advances. It can be hard to remember that at first these were looked at as mostly technology sideshows. Yet they all went on to become serious must-have capabilities on the business side. Microservices is now a current topic of this debate, as the overall approach is perhaps the most strategic technology trend that’s come along in quite some time. First, a brief definition: Microservices provide a well organized digital structuring of our business capabilities that are exposed to stakeholders who need what our organizations can do, and are usually accessed via open APIs.
The concept is now poised to — sooner or later — become the primary digital collaboration fabric with all our enterprise data, IT systems, 3rd party developers, business parters, suppliers, and otherstakeholders.
So, you read it here first: Microservices are how most organizations will eventually conduct the majority of their business, internally andexternally.
Yet there is still considerable debate and confusion about whether microservices are merely just slightly more elegant network plumbing of our digital systems, of if they actually represent the primary conduit for operating our organizations. I fall in the latter camp, as this platform way of thinking in general has steadily emerged as the leading model for composing and integrating networks of systems and organizations. Don’t get me wrong: We had SOA, Web services, and APIs before — where I once posited that this would turn into a global service phenomenon,
which it has — but these each had key details missing or not quite right. At this time, microservices does appear to be the best model we have, honed and culled from over a decade of thousands of organizations experimenting with various approaches. I am now also clearly seeing from many of my CIO and IT contacts that developing a microservices strategy is rapidly becoming a key priority this year. Not sure that this is broadly the case? Just take a look at the recent JAX Enterprise IT priorities survey,
which shows that microservices are currently the 3rd leading IT priority, nearly eclipsing the big trend on the block, cloud computing, one of the other hottest IT topics of recent years. Yet microservices are often conflated with concepts like APIs, for which there is indeed a considerably close relationship, and so can often be relegated to the ‘we’ve been here already’ bin. Why the sudden popularity and interest in what appears to simply be a more refined technique to easily integrate and communicate between digital systems? For almost all the same reasons that the _Business of APIs_ and the _API Economy_
had their days in the sun: Microservices take so many of the lessons learned in creating more composable, reusable, and platform-centric version of our digital organizations, strips them down to their very basics in terms of design and consumption, and then places them at the very center of how our organizations operate. (Note: Not everyone would agree at the strategic level that microservices should be designed and offered at the business domain or architecture level but many, including myself, do.) Naturally, the question is why would we do this, and why would it be just about the most important thing we could do to enable a host of vital business activities and outcomes? Put simply, microservices hold the promise of truly unleashing the greatly underutilized assets of our organizations, both strategic and tactical. These assets include everything from data to talent to innovation, and up until now, we’ve been doing it piecemeal and without a real enterprise-wide design (though I’m cautious about overly top-down efforts here aswell.)
MICROSERVICES: BUILDING BLOCKS OF THE MODERN DIGITAL VALUE CHAIN Microservices, by virtue of offering a well-structured way to engage and integrate with the world at large in scalable, digital terms, now appear to hold the answer to enabling faster digital transformation, lowering our levels of of tight coupling and technical debt, and substantially increasing much needed levels of IT integration. More centrally to business impact and growth, they also make it possible for us to build and cultivate bigger and more robust digitalecosystems
with our stakeholders. This includes 3rd party developers and business partners to our very own workers and customers. For me, I first saw the writing on the wall several years ago when I was helping develop the API strategy for the CIO of one of the largest organizations in the world. We had just completed an all-day workshop studying the benefits of opening up systems and data more simply and easily to make them as consumable as possible. I stressed these key points: 1) Open APIs make it far easier to create and innovate on top of existing IT and data, 2) they make it easy to create additional value many times over through nearly effortless integration between systems, 3) they achieve this asynchronously and highly costeffectively
by systematically designing a high leverage and productized point of global interaction upfront, instead of hundreds of expensive point-to-point integrations over time. Upon reviewing this, the CIO suddenly sat back, the light clearly having come on, and said, “I get it now. The logical conclusion of all of this is that we need toprovide a URI
for every piece of data in our organization.” He was exactly right. Put simply, this means that every element of enterprise data would have a unique link to it through a well-defined interface, which anyone can easily find and use to (yes, securely) access it and update it if appropriate. As I’m fond of saying, civilization advances when formerly difficult things become easier. This is exactly the vision behind microservices: Build and provide an incredibly simple and straightforward way of exposing our businesses in a highly useful and constructive manner so that the effort to connect systems into value chains becomes essentially near zero in practical terms. MINDSET: WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF ANYONE COULD BUILD ANYTHING ON YOURBUSINESS?
The question I then put to those still trying to understand all this is the following: If we could access all our enterprise data simply and easily and could then integrate systems together with just a few lines of code, what could we do this with power? Virtually anything we can dream of, with almost no economic, technical, organization, or political barriers to achieving whatever we — or, and this is thebig key, others
— could dream of doing with our systems and data. Because once strategic microservices that enable this are operational, then anything is possible. That’s because virtually all of our enterprise data can be reached, it can be harnessed, analyzed, and it can flow through to wherever it needs to be to extend and empower the stakeholder/customer experience. In fact, it’s the most potent way we know of yet to create and capture shared value and to do this so efficiently that literally orders of magnitude more high value integrations, connections, and innovations will take place (see: How Amazon Web Services makes most of Amazon’s profit.)
So why hasn’t this happened except in organizations at the very leading edge of the digital maturity curve? Because it takes 1) an understanding of the vital — even existential — importance of doing so in order to rapidly gather around a vibrant ecosystems of app creators, integrators, partners, suppliers, customers, and stakeholders and 2) the pre-emptive removal of the aforementioned economical, technical, organizational, and political barriers to doing so. In short, creating microservices, though they themselves are profoundly elemental network-accessible business capabilities to our organizations, takes real work, much of it consisting of softer, non-technical obstacles in the realm of culture, mindset, inclination, and leadership. We already see examples of this happening at the enterprise vendor level. A particularly compelling example of a global set of microservices that expose much of what an organization does is Microsoft Graph , along with their microservices-friendly Service Fabric.
While some will quibble with whether MS Graph is a set of microservices in the pure sense, the point is this: Much of what Microsoft offers its customers via its products is accessible within a well-organized enterprise-class set of data services. This is strategic to the point that Sayta Nadella has even called Microsoft Graph their “most important bet”,
for all the previously cited reasons. Microservices are also well established at some of the leading organizations in the world, including Amazon, Netflix, Uber, and agood many others
. Less
clear is traditional enterprise adoption at the strategic level, though my personal anecdotal evidence is that this is now very much underway in a growing number of organizations. Another proof point of expected growth is that business consulting firms like Deloitte are seriously talking about microservices as enablers for open banking and other industry transformations. MICROSERVICES AND BUSINESS: THE FUTURE However, in today’s extremely fast-moving world, coming to the conclusion through a largely accidental and piecemeal route that microservices are the future will simply take too long from a competitive standpoint. This will result in a very much less than optimal set of services for your stakeholders. Thus, my advice on microservices in the enterprise is currently this: * MOST ORGANIZATIONS SHOULD NOW BEGIN A CONCERTED EFFORT TO CREATE AN ENTERPRISE-WIDE SET OF MICROSERVICES. And do it as a part of an overarching business strategy. * THIS EFFORT SHOULD BE DECENTRALIZED BUT A CENTRALLY COORDINATED EFFORT. To be used to identify and design needed microservices. * A COMMITMENT MUST BE MADE TO BE IN THE BUSINESS OF INTEGRATION AND DYNAMIC DIGITAL VALUE CHAIN BUILDING. Half measures have long-doomed efforts at SOA, APIs, developer networks, etc. * USE DESIGN THINKING TO UNDERSTAND THE NEEDS OF MICROSERVICES CONSUMERS, THEN MEET THEM. Understanding what the needs are, and being deeply empathetic to key issues like ease-of-use, performance, and the right to build a 3rd party business on them is key. * OPERATE YOUR MICROSERVICES LIKE YOUR CORE BUSINESS. Because they soon will be. Invest in them, advertise them, evangelize them, encourage usage, support them, and generate revenue with them. A growing number of organizations I work with, including most recently one of the largest federal government agencies in the U.S., are now fully cognizant that most of their business will soon be conducted through digital channels. That aforementioned agency is already doing over a quarter of its business through APIs, and expects it will be over half in the next few years. They believe moving from data-based APIs to business-oriented microservices is their next task to go to the next level. So should it be for most organizations. For the enterprise, achieving success with microservices is certainly possible through a patchwork of department APIs that are designed and operated without an overall business strategy, design, or structure. Or we can adopt a holistic microservices approach to create a more uniform, rational, consistent, and contextual set of open digital capabilities that also forms the basis of business strategy and architecture for the organization. The story is unfolding rapidly, and as I mentioned, I’m seeing an all-time high interest in microservices at the most strategic IT levels. Now that story must be told, understood, and realized on the business leadership side aswell.
UPDATE ON SEPTEMBER 20TH: A few commenters have noted that they don’t think that most organizations believe microservices and APIs are actually viewed as business strategy, much less core to it. However, supporting many of the assertions I make above, I recently encountered a recent study from Cloud Elements. Their 2018 integrationsurvey
(which included 400+ companies, 27 industries with 26 outside of tech including finance, communications, engineering, and transportation on 6 continents) reported that 61% found APIs to be critical to their business strategy, and 85% fundamental:ADDITIONAL READING
My current Astrochart for the New C-Suite:
Microservices figures prominently as a key C-level technology andbusiness strategy
A Discussion of the Past and Future of Web APIs with Dion Hinchcliffe| InfoQ
How can businesses keep up with tech change today?| ZDNet
Filed under Analysis , Digital Transformation,
Enterprise Architecture,
Strategy , The
Enterprise ,
Trends and Statistics DESIGNING THE DIGITAL WORKPLACE FOR THE END-TO-END EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE May 10, 2018 1 Comment As digital becomes instrumental to virtually every aspect of how we do our work in organizations today, two parallel and closely related concerns have joined the industry discussion. These two concerns, _workforce engagement_ (which technology can very much help with)
and the _employee journey_,
have risen as urgent topics and joined the overall conversation about the needed capabilities of our work environments. This is because the designs of our future digital workplaces will so deeply inform and define these issues. Over the last few years, I’ve noticed that most enterprises are still not adequately addressing how to effectively develop and maintain a straightforward and effective approach to technology enablement of the most important activities in the workplace. The proximate cause is sheer complexity as well as experiential noise, mostly of too much information with too little filter. Yet ironically, our businesses actually need to incorporate more technology and data into work procsses, not less, to do our jobs better and evolve theorganization.
Thus, the way workplace technology is selected, provided, situated, and supported as a whole has proven generally insufficient to the task of addressing the trio of concerns I’d outlined above. We also have some significant new headwinds that aren’t helping and must be addressed constructively: Pronounced channel proliferation andfragmentation
as well as an explosion of apps that run or better enable the business, especially in the mobile space.
We generally need these applications, but not when their isolation (most don’t connect well to other systems) and fragmented data creates cognitive overload or involves too much effort for us toeffectively use.
Thus I still see many too many workers that in their day-to-day jobs still have to focus on spending much of their time feeding their work systems manually, via import/export and numerous other means, cobbling together an ad hoc experience across dozens of apps, just to prepare to begin their jobs for the day, instead of focusing on the more strategic higher-order knowledge work at hand. The bottom line: Most practitioners I speak with believe there is plenty of room to improve this situation considerably, but aren’t generally sure how yet. Because of this unclear path forward, most of workplaces are still not expending any real effort in developing a more workable and usable overall employee digital experience. This is a major lost opportunity and it ultimately fails to serve our workers, our organizations, and our customers in vital ways.
What’s more, it’s only going to become more of a challenge in the near future as IT continues to proliferate in every part of ourenterprises.
Yet I do find that some of the solution(s) to this situation — and which will take real vision, commitment, and sustained change to realize — do exist in early form and are increasingly at hand. RECONCILING DIGITAL WORKPLACE WITH EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE To address all this, a while back I suggested that we were going to have to develop multi-layered strategies based on one or two experience hubs to cope with the increasingly dense and rich landscape of digital workplace tech. Sooner, rather than later, that we’re going to have to make the user experience, data experience, and community experiences more connected, holistic, and integrated, into some form of better integrated whole that probably looks like a) an enterprise social network, b) an intranet platform, or c) other experience platform where the employee digital experience can be better designed, orchestrated, simplified, aggregated, and connected to the apps and data needed to get work done. I still believe this, but I also now realize that even with this we’re still neglecting the overall picture of employee experience, something that human resources (HR) has long focused on but that IT generally has not, even though our workplaces have inexorably become more and more digitized. The opportunity is clear: By apply coherent purpose and design to the full end-to-end employee experience (pre-hire, employment, and post employment) — yet also proactively allowing ‘eccentric activity’ all around the margins that will drive needed the digital competition for new ways of working (and therefore rapid forward progress) — we can simplify, streamline, and direct the design of our workplaces (digital and physical) as it relates to technology to realize a far better employeeexperience.
To be clear, we won’t — and can’t — design or control the entire employee experience. That’s simply not possible, nor desirable, in today’s highly complex, fast changing, and sophisticated operating environments. Instead, we’ll use a design for loss of control mindset to transform the employee experience while focusing on the major use cases and employee journeys that matter most, while letting localchange agents
pioneer new ideas around the edge. To realize this change we’ll need to make digital workplace a higher order design journey with close partnership between HR and IT (really, in my projects, it’s mostly had to be the CIO and CHRO, who almost exclusively have the purview to mandate bringing together employee experience of every kind under a single umbrella.) Organizations that go from an accidental digital workplace to a more designed one will have much better results with their overall employee experience as well as targeted use cases (typically sales, project management, operations, product development) that have both high impact and strategic significance to the organization. I’ll be exploring this confluence of the three main organizational experiences (worker, customers, and supplier) increasingly as part of my work in understanding the digitalleadership issues
in the enterprise. I believe these must be the primary focus of our organizations going forward, and addressing one helps address theothers.
CATCH ME IN PERSON: You also can join me in Rotterdam, the Netherlandson May 21st, 2018
to further
this discussion as I explore how to apply design thinking and digital workplace strategy to end-to-end employee experience from my latest digital workplace project efforts. Filed under Digital Experience, Digital
Transformation
,
Digital Workplace
, The
Enterprise , The
Future of Work
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