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.