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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

JRC M365 strategy
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

While my focus at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre has been on their Knowledge4Policy platform (K4P), I've recently been pulled in to help design their internal communications, community, collaboration & knowledge management strategy as they grapple with migrating from Jive to M365.

Coda vs. Notion
coda.io

An overview by Coda, with 20 more resources, on Coda & Notion, which both take "a modular approach to digital documentation. You can do traditional docs ... but you never have to leave the tool to build more complex workflows and processes".

6 Patterns in Collaborative Innovation
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04/08/2020
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The Pros and Cons of Collaboration
medium.com
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managers always have to balance the merits of teamwork... with the dangers of “groupthink”... Large groups are remarkably good, on average, at estimating such things as the number of beans in a jar or the weight of a prize calf. But that accuracy relies on the guesses being independent.... Modern communication methods mean that collaboration is mo…

Some groups are smarter than others, and psychologists want to understand why – You Are Not So Smart
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to create a team that is collectively intelligent, you likely need to focus on three specific factors that he and his colleagues have identified in their research...

Must we all collaborate on this? (Top3ics, July 2017)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai

Just one topic in this edition, sparked by Collaborative Overload (Harvard Business Review)... reported “time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more”

Collaborative Overload
hbr.org
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time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more...How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies ... 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own... In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collabor…

7 Ways That Collaboration Makes Teams Less Effective
www.inc.com
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ad-hoc collaboration alienates top contributors, gobbles up time, and makes organizations less effective... an exhaustive study from the Harvard Business Review just revealed that, far from a panacea, collaboration is actually productivity poison. Here are some of the frightening highlights:... 3. Collaboration tends to foists work from the incomp…

'Collaboration' Creates Mediocrity, Not Excellence, According to Science | Inc.com
www.inc.com
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what's usually meant by "collaboration" is 1) plenty of ad-hoc meetings and 2) open-plan offices that increase the likelihood that such meetings take place... open-plan offices... are productivity sinkholes... collaboration tends to penalize the competent who end up doing most of the work. A recent study published in Applied Psychology has now co…

The Future of Augmented Reality Ain’t Pokemon Go
shift.newco.co
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Meta is betting wholly on productivity and the enterprise... over 400 enterprise buyers of his first AR headset... were almost unanimously focused on productivity... he wears his Meta headset throughout the working day... AR’s first killer app in the enterprise, he offers collaborative 3D

A how-to guide for collaborative journalism projects
medium.com
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a comprehensive Electionland case study. This 66-page playbook provides a detailed account of how Electionland was conceived, planned, and executed as the teams involved worked to track and cover voting on Election Day in 2016.

Discuto
www.discuto.io
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Reaching consensus with groups larger than 5 people on any other platform or service is a pain. Discuto helps you get everyone on the same page.Discuto highlights controversies and suggests where to dive in the conversation, making the decision process easier to manage. What's more is that it only takes a few seconds to set up your first discussio…

A Quantitative Basis for Measuring Media Impact
mediashift.org
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A financial incentive and a paid coordinator were essential to the success of the project. The intangible that made the project really work, however, was the willingness on the part of Media Consortium members to work with each other... not have been possible without a trust-based network in place... At the beginning of the project, outlets asked…

How social tools can reshape the organization | McKinsey & Company
www.mckinsey.com

the most valuable tools make it easier for employees to collaborate—and could even transform the way organizations work... We asked executives about their companies’ use of social tools, digital technologies, and big data... using social begets better use of these other technologies. When organizations digitize a process’s work flow ... using soc…

Group text messaging with GroupMe
groupme.com
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Free group messagingIt's like a private chat room for your small group. Have as many as you want, and it's always free. Now, you can coordinate with coworkers, organize a game night, and keep in touch with family all in the same place.

Online Collaboration Tools by Robin Good | ZEEF
online-collaboration-tools.zeef.com
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Software tools, web apps and services for online collaboration

16/12/2015
Collaborating Online Is Sometimes Better than Face-to-Face
hbr.org
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"If you’re embracing online collaboration as a necessary evil — the only way to work with an increasingly dispersed team of global or remote workers, for example — then you’re doing it wrong. Online collaboration is not a second-best substitute for face-to-face work: It’s a complement with its own perks and benefits." - Collaborating Online Is So…

Why work collaboration tools need to change
medium.com
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"today’s social collaboration tools ... are focused on the wrong things, or at least on the wrong scale.... enterprises do business, but people do work. We will see a shift away from tools designed around ‘business’ and instead see a swing to tools that help people accomplish their work... the mantra will be — people first, mobile first, cloud f…

The Truth About Collaboration
medium.com
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"Startups are notorious for this: You’ll have two or three people who are true hustlers, wearing multiple hats, pushing themselves and others to get shit done, while the rest of the group sort of ‘tags along’ and waits for shit to happen. " - The Truth About Collaboration — Medium

Slack lets bosses read your messages
www.theverge.com
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"companies that subscribe to the Plus plan will be able to request every message that employees have sent on the service from that point forward, including direct messages to coworkers and a history of any changes you made to your messages." - Slack alters privacy policy to let bosses read your messages | The Verge

06/12/2014
Why Is Slack So Habit-Forming?
medium.com
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"On the surface, no single factor seems to set Slack apart from a plethora of other collaboration tools. However, a closer look using the model described the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Product, reveals the user psychology behind the company's success." - The Psychology of a Billion-Dollar Enterprise App: Why Is Slack So Habit-Formi…

The third way of office space is beyond open — Gigaom Research
research.gigaom.com

"‘social desking’, where personal workspaces are geared to co-work as well as solitary work. This involves rethinking the office as a shared space, that should be organized around something other than optimizing square meters per employees. Ultimately, it has to be judged by productivity and worker engagement. And the tricky part is not space, but…

Connected Enterprise 2013 - Home
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"Constellation's Connected Enterprise is the intimate innovation summit for senior business leaders successfully using disruptive technologies such as social business, cloud computing, mobile enterprise, big data and analytics, gamification, and unified communications/video to drive business value and transform business models."

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