or
or
or
Tags

Overview: Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is an over-used, over-abused term. Here’s what it means to me.

From many strategies ...

In most organisations, the following strategies are barely on speaking turns, let alone fully integrated and mutually supportive:

  • Internal communication: Every day, valuable ideas and information pour into your organisation as staff engage with stakeholders and discover useful knowledge online. But what happens then? If a piece of knowledge is valuable to them, it's probably also useful to their colleagues ... so why does so little of it circulate within your organisation?
  • Internal collaboration: Are your staff still emailing documents to each other, and spending hours tracing the latest version and integrating changes?
  • Knowledge management: Can your staff find the knowledge they need efficiently, share information effortlessly without flooding everyone’s Inboxes, and serendipitously discover relevant information around the digital equivalent of the office watercooler?
  • External communication: There is no better advocate for any organsation than empowered staff and engaged audiences. Have you transformed your workforce into Social Ambassadors, and launched communities to engage your customers and stakeholders in co-defining the future?
  • Training and employee engagement: Even if you have the tools, can your staff use them? Do they know why they should?

... to one strategy: build an internal innovation community

How can you integrate the above strategies, processes and tools? By treating them as different aspects of one, overarching goal: the creation of an internal innovation community throughout your organisation.

everyone is trained and motivated to share knowledge internally and externally, supported by efficient tools and processes

The idea is to frame the above strategies, processes and tools as interconnected tactics within an overall strategic framework. This aligns them to a shared set of goals: an organisation where everyone is trained and motivated to share knowledge internally and externally, supported by efficient tools and processes for knowledge management, internal and external communications.

From Strategy to Implementation

Having such a strategy is all very well, but noone will notice if you never implement it. You'll need to plan for unknowns, coordinate experts who have never worked together before, and integrate project and change management so that:

  • change rolls out with the new features, tools and processes,
  • these are developed with your staff, not foisted upon them.

I’ve specialised in the intersection of internal and external communications, collaboration and knowledge management since 1995. If you need help, get in touch.

More services: start with Communication strategy.

Relevant resources

The Internet of Tweets
medium.com
Card image

Twitter enables connections between accounts. What exists today as a social network between people who follow and reply to each other could tomorrow expand to be an information network between devices that could follow and reply to each other. - The Internet of Tweets — The Message — Medium

13/06/2015
Why I Write on Medium
medium.com
Card image

"Networks are pretty good for collisions. Bureaucracies are pretty bad for collisions." - Why I Write on Medium — The Message — Medium

The REAL reason Slack became a billion dollar company
medium.com
Card image

"Slack is just another stream ... of continuous information that you have to follow. I remembered I found it distractive and stressful because it was so easy to miss out on stuff.... This is what drives Slacks’ success. Because if you don’t follow Slack all the time you do not and cannot take part in the conversation with your team members anym…

7 Ways to Make the Most Out of Your Summer Interns
www.inc.com
Card image

Good management and approach can make a real difference. Since it's the company's job to manage interns well, here are seven tips will help you get the most out of your summer interns. - 7 Ways to Make the Most Out of Your Summer Interns | Inc.com

The Amazing, Shrinking Org Chart
stoweboyd.com
Card image

"we have slipped into a new era in which volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity have grown dramatically, to the point that companies that are moving fast enough to thrive in our postnormal times must let go of the crutch of top-to-bottom situational analysis... The organization chart is shrinking because we are slowly recognizing wh…

08/06/2015
Manage the Firehose or it will manage you
medium.com
Card image

The inexhaustible flood of information flowing into your PC, phone and brain is not going away... and neither are your ToDos... A recent article in HBR presents two techniques to cope — either undertake behavioural change or use technology... But why not use technology to create space for behavioural change?

07/06/2015
How to Outsmart the Machines
medium.com
Card image

"There are many kinds of intelligence, and many kinds of stupidity. But not all are created equal. The intelligence of a computer is not the stupidity of a human, and vice versa. Which one would you rather be? ... One can be smart in stupid ways... or stupid in smart ways... technology’s making us stupid stupid — not just stupider, but stupider…

Developing Employees Who Think for Themselves
hbr.org
Card image

"If organizations want to enable workers to bring not only their hands but also their heads to work, then jobs need to be redesigned to give people ownership of (1) how they perform tasks, (2) their identity, and (3) their time.... managers complain that their employees don’t think for themselves. Yet ... punish their subordinates for failing …

Getting More Women into Senior Management - HBR
hbr.org
Card image

"Far too many business leaders are... failing to put the necessary muscle behind efforts to promote more women... it is a 3-legged solution: men, women, and organization all have a part to play... there are four things organizations corporate leaders can do to finally, after decades of talk, actually get something done:"

3 Steps Toward More Efficient And Valuable Meetings
www.fastcompany.com
Card image

How many meetings did you attend last week that lacked a specific agenda, started late, and then ended late? How often did you attend a meeting without knowing why you were even there? How many meetings actually resulted in a new idea or an actionable decision? - 3 Steps Toward More Efficient And Valuable Meetings | Fast Company | Business + In…

Driverless cars are going to make some people puke
qz.com
Card image

Surveys indicate ... most people also think they will be able to do things like watch videos, read, play  games, work, text, and browse the internet... content companies could be major beneficiaries from the self-driving car revolution... these types of activities are also the types of thing that increase the frequency and severity of motion si…

02/06/2015
Conquering Digital Distraction
hbr.org
Card image

Control the digital overload rather than letting it control you. But how, exactly, does one do that? We asked two experts: Larry Rosen, a psychologist, and Alexandra Samuel, a technologist. We suspected that their disparate backgrounds would lead them to offer dramatically different advice, and we were right. - Conquering Digital Distraction - …

02/06/2015
Stop Treating Millennial Employees Like Enigmas
www.fastcompany.com
Card image

"In the next five years, millennials will make up half the workforce and 75% of it by 2025... We want to contribute to building something great... with meaning. We’re also talented, driven, and have really high expectations for the companies we join and the type of work we engage in... companies need to ask us what we think and how we feel. Unf…

5 Ways To Make Your Staff Meetings More Engaging
www.fastcompany.com
Card image

Meetings can be the biggest waste of time. Combat that perception by encouraging brainstorming, removing chairs, and yes—offering treats. - 5 Ways To Make Your Staff Meetings More Engaging | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Busted
medium.com
Card image

Absolutely superlative rant. Number 1 of 16: “When challenged on your aims and intentions you repeatedly say profit and growth. When you should know beyond any doubt that they’re the by-product of being brilliant at something people want. Err?" - Busted — Just Thinking — Medium

28/05/2015
In The Future, Drones May Deliver You
readwrite.com
Card image

In addition to the piloted S2 and the newer four-seat S4, Joby has also started mapping out plans for its next-generation of unmanned, remotely controlled versions. In essence, drones for people.  - Forget Pizza: In The Future, Drones May Deliver You - ReadWrite

Driverless cars will shave '£265' off insurance premiums in five years
www.telegraph.co.uk
Card image

Cars will 'eliminate bad driving' and halve insurance costs, according to industry experts - Driverless cars will shave '£265' off insurance premiums in five years - Telegraph

26/05/2015
How to make groups more productive? Add women
medium.com
Card image

"a great deal of recent research suggests that interpersonal intelligence may be as important in business ... social sensitivity, or being attuned to other’s moods, feelings, and psychological makeup." - How to make groups more productive? Add women. — Work Futures — Medium

Self-driving cars and the Trolley problem
medium.com
Card image

"According to Morgan Stanley, self-driving cars will be commonplace in society by ~2025. This got me thinking about the ethics and philosophy behind these cars... can you imagine a world in which say Google or Apple places a value on each of our lives, which could be used at any moment of time to turn a car into us to save others?" - Self-dr…

25/05/2015
Why Create a Culture of Storytelling? | Mitch Ditkoff
www.huffingtonpost.com
Card image

"People bond. Barriers dissolve. Connections are made. Trust increases. Knowledge is transmitted. Wisdom is shared ... a deep sense of interdependence is felt... If you are part of an organization, no matter what it's shape or size, it's time for some meaning making ... by creating engaging opportunities for everyone, from mail room to board ro…

Podcast: Female Perspective on Startups and Lifestyle Businesses
fizzle.co
Card image

In Steph’s inaugural episode we explore the experience and perspectives of women in startups and lifestyle businesses. - The Female Perspective on Startups and Lifestyle Businesses (FS111)

We'll Need Science Fiction To Imagine The Mind-Boggling Future Of War
io9.com
Card image

"Nice way of bringing creatives in to think (ugh) out of the box - run a science fiction contest: "The Art Of Future Warfare ...is based on the idea that writers, artists and game designers have a lot to offer policy wonks... “Unconventional,imaginative thinking and expression can contribute meaningfully to the study and professional conduc…

Robots Really Are Going To Take Your Job
www.fastcoexist.com
Card image

Now that machines can diagnose cancer, trade stocks, and write symphonies, they're not just going to make humans more efficient as they have in the past—they are replacing them entirely and wrecking the economy along the way... Economists tend to dismiss robotization as just another form of "creative destruction." ... that's a mistake... this i…

20/05/2015
Rise of the machines
www.economist.com
Card image

"Firms such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Baidu have got into an AI arms race ... not so much making new sorts of minds as it is removing some of the need for the old sort... deep learning ... is a general-purpose pattern-recognition technique ... any activity which has access to large amounts of data—from running an insurance business to res…

15/05/2015
Sidestepping cognitive biases in group design activities
medium.com
Card image

If you ever wondered why meetings so often lead to the wrong decision ... "... we are wired in certain ways ... that can block groups from processing information effectively, which leads to bad decisions... Gilbert explains how to use diversity and inclusion to get better results from product ideation efforts... One of the most fundamental …

Pervasive Community, Data, Devices and Intelligence
dionhinchcliffe.com
Card image

"the whole point of digital transformation is realizing that technology fundamentally changes how you do business in just about every way. It therefore poses very difficult questions to business and technology leaders: Who best should do our work today? Where does the value come from? What do these new ways of working actually look like? How c…

Can Business & Tech Transform how Government Works?
www.fastcoexist.com
Card image

"The rise of open data, crowd-sourcing, predictive analytics, and other big tech trends, aren't just for companies to contend with. They're also a challenge for government. New technology gives public agencies the opportunity to develop and deliver services in new ways, track results more accurately, and open up decision-making. Deloitte's big ne…

04/05/2015
Do android cars dream of electric streets? (updated)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
Card image

The impact autonomous cars will have on personal mobility and cities will dwarf the disruption Uber and AirBnB have wrought on their respective industries. Joined-up European policies seem in short supply

How Uber’s Autonomous Cars Will Destroy 10 Million Jobs and Reshape the Economy by 2025
zackkanter.com
Card image

"A Columbia University study suggested that with a fleet of just 9,000 autonomous cars, Uber could replace every taxi cab in New York City13 – passengers would wait an average of 36 seconds for a ride that costs about $0.50 per mile.14 Such convenience and low cost will make car ownership inconceivable, and autonomous, on-demand taxis – the ‘trans…

The most important part of self-driving cars will be human control
qz.com
Card image

"... researchers in the field of human factors—experts on how people interact with machines—have shown that we shouldn’t ignore the human element of automated driving... When machines take over, the work required of the human is typically not remove... Rather, the job becomes different... require designing new, innovative ways to keep the drive…

03/05/2015
Cookies disclaimer

MyHub.ai saves very few cookies onto your device: we need some to monitor site traffic using Google Analytics, while another protects you from a cross-site request forgeries. Nevertheless, you can disable the usage of cookies by changing the settings of your browser. By browsing our website without changing the browser settings, you grant us permission to store that information on your device. More details in our Privacy Policy.