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.theverge.com
Howdy, a bot company devoted to automating common workplace tasks. Its product lives in Slack ... operates in the background, listening for the keywords and questions that will activate its powers. ... automates meetings, asking what people are working on, collating their answers, and distributing them to the team ... take your lunch order ... AI…
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
Just in time for your Christmas break, a hand-picked selection of posts designed to give you something to think about as the year turns.
medium.com
"product management in media is the intersection between journalism, user experience, software, data and analytics" Just replace 'media' with government and you've got a manifesto for participative government right there. - The Need For Product Management In Media — Medium
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
An interview with Jim Bankoff, who just raised another raised $46.5 million in funding for Vox Media ("the fastest growing Web brand of 2014"), caught my eye.
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.niemanlab.org
New report ”examines the current state of data journalism... calling for more transparency on how data is collected and used in journalism, anticipating an explosion in news apps as a way of producing information, and ways newsrooms can address security around their data and reporting. " In particular, I love this: "...the advice that newsroom le…
gigaom.com
Deadtree media to do more with legacy content than paper birdcages! The latest high-profile move into explanatory journalism is New York Times' The Upshot: "offer a combination of data journalism and explanatory reporting ... head-to-head with Ezra Klein’s Vox and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight ... a kind of internal aggregator and explainer for…
Like
media,
journalism,
data journalism,
data,
content strategy,
information,
nytimes,
online architecture,
explanatory
adage.com
Surprise surprise... "Circa is developing two types of ads: magazine-style full-screen banners, like Flipboard, and sponsored posts... which look and feel like editorial, created by a separate staff.... One future revenue possibility would be licensing access to Circa's article data to other publishers," - News App Circa Looks to Na…
recode.net
Interesting perspective on the rash of new tech-content hybrids emerging in the media space. Back in the day, companies could be either tech or content, but not both: "What were you going to be really good at? Engineering or “content”? You couldn’t do both, because that would mean that one would be subordinate to the other. And if you were going…
www.niemanlab.org
"“Fished out of the shadows, old news coverage in China’s media can provide clues to the family connections of government officials as reporters investigate their financial dealings.”"
www.fivethirtyeight.com
Looking forward to geeking out: Info architecture: Guessing some serious cardsorting went into this off the cuff remark: "the new FiveThirtyEight will provide coverage of five major subjects: politics, economics, sports, science, and lifestyle. By design, almost any topic in the news can potentially fit into one or more of these categories. " A…
www.niemanlab.org
Data-driven storytelling, sharable journalism in a British skunkworks. What's not to like? From NiemanLab: "Data-driven storytelling and web-native, sharable journalism are two of the biggest trends in media at the moment. If you locked the two together in a room, Ampp3d might walk out the door ... As a news site, Ampp3d keeps its output fairly …
paidcontent.org
A great article on preventing the data tail wagging the editorial dog. " It turns out that what loyal audiences care about is what good editorial teams care about too: great articles that capture time and attention."