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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

Gimlet Media’s latest membership perk? A Slack channel for die-hards
www.poynter.org
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the company's newest tweak to its membership program is one that puts listeners in direct conversation with the company's staffers. The idea: Give Gimlet's members access to the company's Slack team

The Washington Post is using Slack to create a reader community focused on the gender pay gap » Nieman Journalism Lab
www.niemanlab.org

Slack, already an indispensable tool within newsrooms, is becoming a surprisingly effective community tool for publishers as well... quickly become a source of stories, with members providing inspiration or even direct contributions.

12/07/2016
This Is Microsoft Outlook's Coolest New Feature
time.com
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While Slack is basically a chat room for your business (with private messaging functionality), Groups also lets users share common calendars, OneDrive-hosted files, and OneNote notebooks... With Groups threaded messages, however, anyone with access can dive in at any time and read back over all the entries without being distracted by other items i…

07/06/2016
Bots for discovering related content | Vox Product Blog
product.voxmedia.com
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When a Vox Media Slack user sends a direct message to simbot specifying a seed article URL and a number of desired results, then the bot would return a ranked list of articles that are most similar in content to the article found in the provided URL. two main applications for the bot ... enable editors ... on social media... to discover related…

28/04/2016
The Backlash edition: Slack, Bots & Content Marketing (Top3ics , 27 April)
mathewlowry.myhub.ai
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bandwagons are bad for your health, as illustrated by the impending death of content marketing and the gathering backlash against Slack (Slacklash? BackSlacksh?) and (already!?) chatbots.

Curing Our Slack Addiction
blog.agilebits.com

this addiction has been killing my sanity and sapping our productivity as we simply used Slack for too many things... we would add more channels in a desperate attempt to allow people to find the important information they needed while avoiding the noise... All of these interactions would happen in Slack, despite there being many other tools tha…

Is group chat making you sweat?
m.signalvnoise.com
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What we’ve learned is that group chat used sparingly in a few very specific situations makes a lot of sense. What makes a lot less sense is chat as the primary, default method of communication inside an organization.... All sorts of eventual bad happens when a company begins thinking one-line-at-a-time most of the time... Frazzled, exhausted, and …

The search for the killer bot
www.theverge.com
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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…

14/01/2016
So Yeah We Tried Slack... and We Deeply Regretted It
blog.freecodecamp.com
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they clearly state that there is "no limit on how many people you can add to your team on Slack." So we assumed we wouldn't need to worry about outgrowing their service. But trusting Slack's marketing would prove to be a huge mistake. - Free Code Camp's Learn to Code Blog: So Yeah We Tried Slack... and We Deeply Regretted It

The REAL reason Slack became a billion dollar company
medium.com
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"Slack is just another stream ... of continuous information that you have to follow. I remembered I found it distractive and stressful because it was so easy to miss out on stuff.... This is what drives Slacks’ success. Because if you don’t follow Slack all the time you do not and cannot take part in the conversation with your team members anym…

The Amazing, Shrinking Org Chart
stoweboyd.com
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"we have slipped into a new era in which volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity have grown dramatically, to the point that companies that are moving fast enough to thrive in our postnormal times must let go of the crutch of top-to-bottom situational analysis... The organization chart is shrinking because we are slowly recognizing wh…

08/06/2015
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…

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