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.gsb.stanford.edu
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www.briansolis.com
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www.inma.org
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medium.com
a new role that I believe will become more and more important: the Minister of Culture.WARNING: REAL CONTENT AHEAD! This essay links to most of the best research on culture. ... I’ll also show how to generate a culture score for your company and improve it. ... a full 3-6 month course on culture ... Don’t think of this as a long post — think of it…
sloanreview.mit.edu
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hbr.org
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www.themediabriefing.com
Interesting description of the benefits of being a 'fast follower' by The Economist's Paul Rossi: "instilling a culture across the business where staff are keeping an eye on what's going on ...the editorial side [is] ... actively talking to people about new technologies. How to deliver content, how to deliver video... on the commercial team everbo…
www.linkedin.com
'Innovation' threaded its way through a lot of the resources added to my TumblrHub last week: from innovation-friendly management through to innovative Content Management Systems for tomorrow's newsmedia business models and personal productivity tools.
Think
innovation,
management,
community,
strategy,
internal communications,
culture,
hr,
open data,
newsletter,
employee engagement
www.inma.org
5 principles for any organisation seeking to innovate digitally. Most cover the role of management and organisational structure (flat vs hierarchical structures, cross-silo interdisciplinarity, etc.), but the one that resonated most for me was cultural: "...one of the main cultural challenges [to innovation]... focus on optimising current proce…
www.inc.com
5 brief points on how leaders can get everyone thinking strategically, and not just reacting. I personally like point 4: "4. Create a philosophy. ... communicate a well-articulated philosophy, a mission statement, and achievable goals throughout your company. Individuals and groups need to understand the broader organizational strategy in orde…
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…