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
www.npr.org
In his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam investigates who comes up with great ideas, how, and what we can do to have more of them.... They often procrastinate, and that's how they incubate ideas.... Their parents focus more on values than rules... One of the risks is, you know, you have everybody marching in a different…
www.fastcompany.com
innovation is a series of steps, and that innovators possess certain characteristics... Almost everybody [has] innovative traits... the ability to think abstractly, having deep and broad knowledge, curiosity, openness to risk, grit, and dissatisfaction with the status quo... seek out experiences to put those traits to use
qz.com
“agile” describes so many different work systems that it’s become an almost meaningless term... for IBM “the leaders have to be with the squads [his word for small teams] and the squads have to be in a location.”... Research suggests remote workers are more productive and log more hours than employees who work in the office, and for many companie…
archive.boston.com
Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," ... found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects.... virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings... "Diversity... seems to bring out the turtle in all of …
hbr.org
What determines whether the ideas we generate are truly creative? Recent research of ours finds that one common factor often gets in the way: we tend to undervalue the benefits of persistence.
www.fastcompany.com
First, some useful definitions: "Imagination is envisioning things that don’t exist... Creativity is applying imagination to address a challenge. Innovation is applying creativity to generate unique solutions. And entrepreneurship is applying innovations, scaling the ideas, by inspiring others’ imagination... the way to innovate is to look a…
io9.com
"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…
medium.com
While an excellent takedown of 'traditional' (group-focused) brainstorming techniques, this article should mention that individuals applying brainstorming techniques get good results. "In every case, four people working individually generated between 30 to 40 percent more ideas than four people working in a group. Their results were of a higher q…
open.bufferapp.com
"Here's what I've come up with for advice to the 20-year-old version of me on being creative." Particularly like Neil Gaiman's advice: " A lot of times ideas will turn up when you're doing something else. And, most of all, ideas come from confluence - they come from two things flowing together. " Which is why I-Labs is all about bringing peo…
medium.com
Enjoying this excellent guide to ideation by Krysta Curtis. Something for the weekend: admit it, you won't have time for this much fun during the week: - Paint-by-Idea — Medium
www.fastcompany.com
Yet another list. My fave: "Geniuses produce a lot of crap before they get to the good stuff. " - 4 Things We Have Wrong About Creativity | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
weblog.mediatemple.net
Easier said than done. It'd be a lot simpler if we could just Kill the Mediocre. "From startups to global enterprises I see two things. One, I've observed the voicing of ideas that immediately vanish into the ether of complacence, politics or blatant disregard. Two, I've witnessed the escape of morale where employees refuse to share ideas to im…
sloanreview.mit.edu
"coming up with creative ideas on demand is only part of the answer. Just as crucial is how ideas link to action. ...we have developed an integrative process for idea generation based on approaches drawn education, consumer research, business model design and emergent strategy... The first three steps are designed to help managers understa…
timkastelle.org
the company that invented Gore-Tex... “organised in small teams of 8-12 people.... three layers of management, the CEO, a handful of functional heads, and Associates … in a company of 8000!