Relevant Overviews
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
blog.semilshah.com
the rise of Trump using language of how we talk about startups that become black swans.
medium.com
the fear is that the platform will change without warning, and teams will have ended up wasting precious time and effort before they get a chance to get it right or reap the benefits if they do.
www.poynter.org
This is a completely new way to launch a media startup,... Most startups start with VC funding or a foundation grant or corporate support and then go chasing after an audience. But our crowdfunding approach means that #EmergingUS will be built on an audience of thousands... treated as real stakeholders. They'll play a big role in shaping the cont…
blog.growth.supply
Thinking of pursuing your next idea? Read this definitive guide first... a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is all about verifying the fact that there is a market where your potential company can call home and bring in paying customers. It’s about finding your early adopters and seeing exactly they are willing to pay for.... [but] an entreprene…
medium.com
So I put together a landing page, sent a few newsletters to myself, then wrote a post on Medium. It featured 75 outstanding pieces of journalism ... my Minimum Viable Product. Naturally, nobody showed up to read the post. Then, somehow, Rand Fishkin (the CEO of Moz.com) found it and spread the word " - The Medium Viable Product — Thoughts on…
medium.com
"The true purpose of an accelerator is to teach the method of entrepreneurship, so that on graduation day the founders have the knowledge and tools to keep improving. Funding, launching, weekly growth, etc is all a bonus." - Improving Startup Accelerators — Startups & Venture Capital — Medium
fizzle.co
In Steph’s inaugural episode we explore the experience and perspectives of women in startups and lifestyle businesses. - The Female Perspective on Startups and Lifestyle Businesses (FS111)
medium.com
"Stacy sits down with Google Ventures to share her perspectives on startup hiring, leadership, and more." Also a good example of video journalism, but a comparison between total Reads (as measured usign Medium's womderful metrics) vs number of views of the embedded videos - i.e., do people watch them, or just read the textual summaries? - Manage…
medium.com
"When you have a job, it’s amazing how many startup ideas you come up with... I’m sure my list of ideas contains a few that could be much bigger than ReadMe. However, the point isn’t to find the idea with the biggest market size. It’s to find the right idea for you... I spent too much time waiting for other people. Investors, cofounders, mentors.…
medium.com
"Startups are notorious for this: You’ll have two or three people who are true hustlers, wearing multiple hats, pushing themselves and others to get shit done, while the rest of the group sort of ‘tags along’ and waits for shit to happen. " - The Truth About Collaboration — Medium
medium.com
"I’ve seen many successful startups emerge and flourish outside of Silicon Valley, like Hootsuite, Jive, Bazaarvoice, Omniture, Spredfast, Sprinklr, BuddyMedia, BlaBlaCar, Freelancer, and a plethora of Chinese tech companies ... let’s first break down the pros and cons of having your startup be in Silicon Valley" - Your Tech Startup Doesn’t Nee…
firstround.com
Great read on intrapreneurs and innovation. Thinking the @bloggingportal reboot probably qualifies ... "When you treat something like it's stupid, you have fun with it, you don't put too much structure around it. You can enjoy different types of success... no one is watching you and there are no expectations... The best thing a startup can d…