How to Think About and Prepare for Hybrid Work

October 12, 2021 1 Comment

Over the last year-and-a-half there have been two priorities for digital transformation, with two different transformations that have happened in our organizations. The first was customer experience, and has largely proceeded well, with a few challenges. The other major change was in the workplace itself. Tellingly, the transformation of work has been, frankly, the harder challenge, and always has been.

First, the good news: I have been largely gratified to see that budgets and priorities for digital workplace and digital employee experience are higher than ever before. The reason is simple: The urgency is there like never before. But we’re still having significant challenges getting our organizations focused on meeting worker needs in this regard during the pandemic, even determining what those needs really are. Some parts of the near future are clearer however: By all indications, work is not going to go back to the way that it was.

Instead, the hybrid model is now generally agreed upon by most as the future of work, both physical and remote, but with a need for it to be as seamless as possible across both groups of workers. And ultimately, it’s the seamless part that will be the challenge, the hardest part to get right, and probably the most important part to address.

A return to the office is going to happen at scale soon, and is even now happening in many places in the United States and in the world. But for most, it will be next year, 2022, as the global return to the workplace for most of us. As it was during the pandemic, technology is still the best tool we have to address our problems, challenges, and opportunities with disruptive shifts to the the work environment. But the tech has to address human needs, first and foremost. So one of the big messages here is that success will require aiming at and achieving worker-centricity like never before.

Simply put, if organizations wish to attract and retain workers in these very trying times, where labor markets are so very tight, we have to design it around those same people. So as to be very adaptive to them, and to educate them, and to be focused on their wellness. There have been bold experiments in some of the efforts i’ve advised, where they actually monitor the mental and physical wellbeing of the workers in real time and provide assistance to them if they need it. While these tend to be large organizations that to do this, helping workers to be resilient and helping them to be effective during confusing and challenging moments will be vital. These digital employee experiences will be designed more deliberately not for one audience, not just for the office, and not just for remote work.

Last year I was on record saying that we should focus on designing for remote work-first, otherwise we’re going to underdeliver for the remote worker, the largest group in most organizations. But this year and going forward, we have really have to put in-office and remote workers on the same footing. I also see that most organizations are still unprepared for this. They want to do deliver on it, but they’re unprepared and they’re behind in applying the tools and concepts available to them. I’m hoping what we have now learned will help them get ahead.

Getting the Foundation and Values Right for Hybrid Work

And so in the visual below are the four major focus areas we must deliver on if we wish to be an enlightened organization that seeks to understand what they should best be providing in terms of their workplace and services with their workers in general. Hybrid workplaces — like all workplaces — need to be value-led, and that’s around mutual benefit as much as possible, with shared value exchange and co-ownership. This is already exhibited in many of the things that we see in the most modern collaboration tools: We are co-workers whenever we work together, we share together, we co-create together in a scalable but sustainable way. And it has to be responsible in our world as well, and in terms of creating trust, protecting workers, and their privacy and safety. To be environmentally conscious, ethical and fair trade. All those important aspects that we really value in ourselves and in our organizations. All of this has to be embodied deeply in the hybrid employee experiences that we create in order for them to be properly realized.

We must also be resilient now more than ever before, so ready for that future that is coming faster at us, more chaotically. Workers must be provided with a work environment that is very adaptable to the two main settings of hybrid work. These environments must inherently be harder to disrupt, since it’s increasingly clear that we live in a world that’s more easily disrupted now, and more frequently disrupted as well. And above all hybrid work must address what it means to be human, meaning it is fair and equitable, and genuinely cultivating our differences, because we are all different in our own way.

We must also be prepared to support the edge of our networks and organizations, for experiments and the eccentric but often useful new behaviors and ideas. I’ve spoken many times in the past about the companies that have lived the longest. They have tended to be very humane organizations that are very tolerant on the edge of eccentricities and innovation. As a result and due to fostering this, and providing support for the whole person, not just the worker part of the person, they have lasted the ag, through all disruptions so far.

Collectively then, this is the future of work, the motivations and aspirations that matter the most, as I see it, for enlightened organizations, which most of us aspire to become.

The Biggest Concern About Hybrid Work: The Divide

So if we look at what top leaders are seeking in hybrid work — I’ve spoken with dozens of CIOs since all this started and many CHROs as well — and if you look at their top goals, there’s a real concern about connecting office workers with remote workers. Connecting them together equitably is widely believed to be a very hard yet important challenge. Some organizations are in fact just saying, “we just can’t do it. We’re going to favor the office workers.” A lot are tacitly doing exactly that. And that will really be leaving behind some of their most valuable and most dynamic workers. But many would still prefer not to.

So there is real interest in maximizing the inclusion between office and remote workers. There are genuine challenges in achieving this: What do you do about key worker groups like agile teams, for example? Agile teams are supposed to be co-located so that information flows very quickly among them. I’ve had CIOs ask me how do we deliver agility during hybrid work? Do we keep Zoom calls open between the office workers and remote workers, all day long? While that’s probably not the answer, it’s an example of a central class of problems in digital employee experience that organizations seek answers to:

How do we properly rethink vital business processes that will be divided between two distributed groups of workers?

In general, what organizations actually want to know is what they should do that works? In other words, what are the overall best practices of hybrid work? However, I am sad to report that there mostly is no set of existing best practices yet. Fortunately, over the next year we’ll see the greatest number of experiments in hybrid work that we’ve ever had before. In the process, we are going to find the way, as we collectively learn from what’s really working out there. As part of this, I will gathering success stories, patterns that work, and I will continue to share them.

What’s the Immediate Goal of Hybrid Work?

Leaders also want to preserve the productivity dividend of remote work. Productivity is up in most organizations right now, when we are mostly remote. But now with hybrid, we want to preserve and continue this. And we want to sustain the engagement long term of remote workers themselves as employees. Most organizations I speak with are acutely aware that they have 18 months worth of new hires that many of them have never met. They’re not really connected to the mothership like the workers before. So how do we how do we do that, how do we address engaging effectively with remote workers?. And then how do we deal with all the disruptions that are yet to come? These are the three leading priorities in achieving a hybrid work model. We care about all the other motivators above too, but these stand out.

In fact, if organizations do nothing but address these three goals, they’ll be doing well next year.

The journey itself to hybrid work is now over halfway done. There are three phases that lead there: The pre-pandemic way of working, or the way life that was before, where in-office was dominant and a some of us had VPNs and we could work remotely. And while some did work remotely, but it wasn’t a very large audience. And now that has flipped. We’re still in that flip, with more remote workers than in-office. But people are streaming back now because people are starting to go back to the office. Next year we’re going to end up with that mix, that will average in the 60/40 range, though your mileage will certainly vary.

Key Organization Roles over Hybrid Work

Last year I began to receive calls for the first time from Chief Operating Officers (COOs.) I had never received a call from a COO before. The CIO is the leader that traditionally rolls out new technology solutions and the COO has to operate the company wit the tech the former provides. When they called me, they were saying “I need to be able to run the company with everyone remote. I don’t know what to ask the CIO and CHRO for in order to do this. So how do we do this? I don’t know how to run a company through a WiFi connection. Can you tell me what I should be asking for?”

The Three Phases of Work: Pre-Pandemic, Remote Work, Hybrid Work

And so know this of those in the COO role, they’re very operationally focused, and trying to get their organization through the turmoil of going remote, and now hybrid. Consequently, if you’re trying to drive change, the COO is a role you should be tapping into if you’re seeking to make realize hybrid work today. They’re in the middle of it, they want to do it now (and not in some theoretical future) and they’re willing to try anything to see if it works. So it’s a very exciting new role that we’ve learned that has been involved in trying to make all of these changes during the pandemic both effective and functional.

What Do Workers Need During Hybrid Work

The upshot is that we’re now at this moment in the rebirth of work. That the future is not the model of remote work that we’ve had over the last year and a half. Now is the time when have to start really becoming effective at hybrid work. And that means connecting two very different audiences and that’s really the challenge. To do this, we’ll need a target model for digital employee experience and the resulting engagement that we should be aiming for and can use as a cross-check. Something that we can use to layer our design into and ensure we are creating the right result. As a primary check, I have developed a model for digital employee engagement that is based on Maslow’s hierarchy that has been very well received.

For post-pandemic, this hierarchy is a view of our employee experience needs. If you look at the bottom of it, there are the fundamentals, which is mostly basic access: Getting people access to their devices and the Internet, to their documents, applications, and data, in touch with their colleagues, customers, partners and suppliers, and all the support functions that make them work. This basic access means being able to reach them.

Then the next step up is once you’ve provide access, it is to make the digital employee experience usable. And really because access actually doesn’t really provide that much value without usability, it has to be something you can actually deliver on. And so usability also covers having streamlined digital experiences, making business processes and procedures easily learned and usable, making sure your cybersecurity protections aren’t making the access too difficult. In fact, we still see cybersecurity practices are creating a lot of challenges for usability. Your overall digital workplace can suffer greatly if you don’t solve for easily usable security procedures and experiences.

An organization might have the best digital workplace capabilities in the world with a a wonderful design, but if workers are frequently having challenges just logging in and switching applications, struggling to use it on mobile devices and they’re always struggling to use it, then the rest of hierarchy doesn’t really matter. And so you really have to hammer down those sharp edges before you can get very high in this hierarchy.

Beyond these levels is proactive enablement: How do you ensure that you’re getting the actual work outcomes you’re looking for? That both professional and personal developments are taking place? So this view makes the worker the center, treating that whole person, wherever they are located. This makes sure that that a connection is being established between in-office and remote with effective collaboration that is regularly taking place between in-office and remote.

And if you do this well, then you can actually get to engaged workers. If you’re really connecting to people, and you’re helping them reach the outcomes that they care about, then they can get to and the organization can realize true engagement. That’s connecting with and responding to the mission of the company or the organization with coworkers and colleagues, with management team, and with the work being done. We want them to be engaged and if they are provided the layers below that, then organizations can achieve hybrid worker engagement.

And then the next step is really where, where we are today in many organizations: We don’t want worker drones just mindlessly carrying out processes. No, we can automate that now. Most rote standard work that’s routine can and will be automated. Instead, we need empowered workers that can think, that can innovate, that are able to make both local decisions that make a difference, and be able to influence larger decisions and the wider organization, and to make sure that they can do that easily. That’s empowerment and that’s where a lot of organizations are still trying to get to this point in time.

The next-to-last step in the hierarchy is full realization and autonomy, the ability to self organize, to direct the work. This is embodied in the famous Steve Jobs quote saying, “I hire really smart people, and then I ask them to tell me what to do.” The bottom line is if you have these layers properly realized below then you can get truly autonomous and strategically contributing workers that are engaged in the mission, who are able to then innovate and be able to direct that to an outcome. And so this all this leads to self actualization and the maximum potential of the worker, which we now have to take care to provide in a hybrid work environment.

While we can never reach our maximum theoretical potential, we should in fact be able to get pretty close to our maximum practical potential. So aim at this. This is a nice clearly laid out goal that will ensure that will help organizations prioritize how to create a human-centric workplace that will function both in a hybrid environment and in wherever else we find ourselves in the future.

We Must Go Faster and Better, Beyond Basics to Real Hybrid Worker Needs

Instead, what workers have today is not designed against a consistent model such as this hierarchy. Thus is has low usability, low access, and low empowerment. It’s often mostly a jumble of technology that’s not aimed at a coherent employee experience and it has very little overall design. And while we can never design all of it, we have to design a lot more of it today and now for our emerging world of hybrid work, particularly the important piece: The core employee experience. These are the prime activities workers carry out the most or are the most important. So we have this new worker journey, a more coherent digital experience. Today it is the whole worker journey, and we have all these things: The applications the devices, the data, our culture, our processes operations, and we need to design around that coherent experience so the beginning of the worker journey, the middle of their of their journey which is where they spend most of their time, and then finally the end of the journey.

Consider all this, what I’ve been encouraging organizations to do — and this is the next useful framework — is think about that journey and say how do you make, how do I make sure each step of that journey, supports the hierarchy that was just described. To ensure that it is a fairly simple cross check. I’m getting lots of feedback that basic cross checks helps focus on what matters most. And so what we want to do is get to a more orderly foundation for employee experience. So we want to take today’s current relatively random, grab bag of tools, technologies, files, and datasets and so on, and create an employee experience platform that’s better designed. One that’s better aligned aligned to that journey and delivering to that hierarchy of worker needs. So this view above is another key cross check that can make sure that organizations can get to hybrid work.

The result is still largely the same grab bag of workplace technologies but now better shaped into an experience platform that actually can help us achieve a true work-from-anywhere foundation and a true hybrid work foundation that’s proactively enabling, is adaptive and automated in terms of when they need support and help, and deeply personalized and contextual with all the technologies. What’s more, we have reached a stage of maturity of the ideas that we need to make this happen are already here. We just have to deliver on it, and we start with the core employee experience.

These then are all the pieces one needs to check to make sure they have everything they need for a next generation digital employee experience. This is the full strength vision. But the key is this: We have to have deliver two versions of our experiences now. The remote version and the in-office version. They’re often not the same. How people work, how people collaborate, or how they get onboarded as workers are different if they’re remote and different if they’re in the office. So we have to we have to reflect that in the employee experience. If you’re giving everyone the exact same employee experience, you’re leaving a lot of value on the ground and disengaging the worker it doesn’t serve well.

The result is going to be les fit to purpose and is going to be slower and not as effective for one half of your workers. And when we, when we need to be worker-centric, we can’t do that anymore. Thus we now have this bright dividing line in our holistic employee journey: The remote and the in-office worker experience, and bringing them together is hybrid work.

Seizing the Moment in Hybrid Work

This is a historic opportunity that many of us will probably never get again. We may never get the leadership attention, organizational priority, or the budget like we can today, or the ability to drive large changes in work like we have right now. Now is the time, while everything is still in motion to make a big change, a meaningful set of changes around the future of work. To actually succeed, we’ll need to use very clear methods. Let’s use this well-defined hierarchy and let’s use this mature worker journey, and let’s go through everything that we have and where it makes sense, let’s align to that. While you can’t change everything, you can change what matters most. That’s all we really have to focus on right now for hybrid work.

We now have to create now a hybrid working culture and mindset that’s gets our top executives and the line workers engaged as a whole in a distributed but very lumpy new construct. Many of you know that I’m a very big proponent of open collaboration, also known as mass collaboration, that best drives almost all the outcomes that we want to have and all the things I just described. There are ways of getting the organization engaged around the shift to hybrid work, and around what you’re doing and around the changes that you need to have in empowering change agents in your organization. In fact, of the things that we explored in our industry for the last decade and a half, how we collaborate and realize change is more important than ever.

Technology, and especially seamless and effective community and collaboration, are the fabric for how we’re going to achieve successful hybrid work. And so the end state is this open collaborative highly adaptive contextual, automated, and personalized employee experience on your evolving employee experience (EX) platform, directed at two distributed groups. One that really is designed not just for the moments that matter to the business but moments that matter to the worker. Put simply, if you want to attract and retain the best workers, that’s what you’re going to provide. You’re going to provide something that has the everything the business needs and everything the worker needs as well, no matter how they best work or where they are located.

End Note: This blog post is adapted from a keynote I recently gave at IOM Summit. It contains much of my latest thinking on hybrid work and references all the research I’ve conducted and some of the great many industry conversations I’ve had recently.

Call for Participation: If you are in a position to do so, please help me map the future of work. I will be closely tracking the many experiments of hybrid work over the next 18 months. If you wish to be part of this tracking and information process, please send me a note at dion@constellationr.com, and I’ll include you in the process so that we can all learn from each other. I’ll also be publishing snapshots of the journey so that organizations who cannot participate for whatever reason, can join along in the journey.

Additional Reading

My recent research on remote and hybrid work:

Reimagining the Post-Pandemic Employee Experience

It’s Time to Think About the Post-2020 Employee Experience

Research Report: Building a Next-Generation Employee Experience: 2021 and Beyond

The Crisis-Accelerated Digital Revolution of Work

Revisiting How to Cultivate Connected Organizations in an Age of Coronavirus

How Work Will Evolve in a Digital Post-Pandemic Society

A Checklist for a Modern Core Digital Workplace and/or Intranet

Creating the Modern Digital Workplace and Employee Experience

The Challenging State of Employee Experience and Digital Workplace Today

The Most Vital Hybrid Work Management Skill: Network Leadership

My 2020 Predictions for the Future of Work

Can we achieve a better, more effective digital workplace?

Filed under collaboration, Digital Experience, Digital Workplace, Social Collaboration, Strategy, The Enterprise, The Future of Work, Trends and Statistics

Revisiting How to Cultivate Connected Organizations in an Age of Coronavirus

March 19, 2020 1 Comment

Looking back at it from the vantage point of the current coronavirus pandemic, it’s clear now that most organizations missed a golden opportunity about five to seven years ago. This was the height of industry discussion around and worldwide business implementation of enterprise social networks, a leading form of internal online community.

Known in shorthand as the ‘ESN’, this emerging class of communication and mass engagement platform was inspired by the runaway growth and success of the global social media revolution. The ESN focused on creating a living, breathing organization-wide digital fabric of open connections, conversations, knowledge sharing, and meaningful collaboration that was as egalitarian as it was eminently useful.

Optimism was rife back then and progress seemed tantalizingly close in resolving the many issues with the aging model of corporate organizational hierarchies. There’s no doubt about it: The vision for the enterprise social network was as utopian as it was grand. I know, because I can count myself as one of the leading proponents of people-connected technologies back in that age. I even wrote a popular book on the subject, when the management and design theory behind it was known as social business.

But the ESN revolution was also grounded in using technology to go well beyond the limiting constraints of the real world when it comes to distance, time, experience, or access to leaders or subject matter experts. The ESN flourished in many organizations, and they still do, though I notice a distinctly more subdued tone today when I talk to ESN owners, practitioners, and the specialized staff that help them run well, community managers.

Back in those days, we eventually accumulated enough experience to know what worked and what didn’t: It was easy to roll out the tools and hard to shift the culture and skills, but as an industry, we largely learned how to make them successful. For those that wanted it, a virtual organization of vibrant digital connections formed a network across the company that became a central conduit for learning, knowledge capture/management, operations at scale, vital peer-based support, and so much more.

Creating a Connected Organization with Enterprise Social Networks and Online Community

However, the ESN was different enough that it required strong stakeholders and passionate evangelists who would rarely leave its side or tire. Since the heady early days, I’ve noticed that ESNs tend to come and go if their sponsors and/or champions move on. That’s not to say there haven’t been and don’t continue to be many success stories. There are.

The Need for Resilient Digital Communities Has Come Roaring Back

Enter the coronavirus. The dasher of hope and changer of worlds in so many ways. There have been few times in history where the workplace has been so thoroughly disrupted as it has been today by COVID-19. The workforces of virtually every organization globally is either on a mandatory work at home policy or soon will be. My analysis of what to do in the early days of being suddenly remote is easily one of the most popular things I’ve written in recent years.

To say most organizations are not ready to become “suddenly remote”, as the phrase of art has become, is an understatement. In short, organizations around the world have essentially been physically disbanded until further notice. This is an incalculable shift. Our Internet connections are now our main lifeline by far to our work lives, to our colleagues, and to our careers. It’s as isolating for many, as it is freeing for others.

As it turns out, remote work is also a profoundly different way of functioning in our jobs that is inherently less social (unless we substantially augment it to be otherwise), more siloed, and disconnected than most of us are prepared for. Especially when we have to work remotely all the time, for days, weeks, or months on end, which is the reality at this time.

The Return of the Enterprise Social Network

In the current period of prolonged dislocation from our old work lives, wouldn’t it be incredibly useful if we already had a robust digital support structure in place? One that we’ve long since carefully crafted and built up from the connections of people that we’ve met either physically or virtually. While we actually have that in the form of our consumer social networks (or at least many of us do), it’s almost completely out of context for our workplace needs.

It’s a shortcoming of our own making. Our attempts to train workers to be digitally savvy has had long and sustained gaps because we’ve been able to lean on our legacy physical skills and environments. In the past, I’ve attempted to describe the necessary digital skills to help workers adapt to this new work more gradually. They are all predicated on building modern social capital, meaning have a broad, diverse, and strong network of connections to people in today’s modern operating environment: The global digital networks that infuse everything today.

Yet in the context of our work at least, most of us are now completely lacking this social capital, these connections, or a virtual community around us, just when we need it most.

Instead, for those organizations that didn’t make the determined and sustained efforts to do the hard work of creating an enterprise social network (or equivalent), the workers who have been tossed overnight into entirely remote working situations are finding it hard going. Their familiar communal work environment is gone. Their outdated tools don’t keep them plugged into the pulse of the organization.

In fact, most workers badly need the resilient and vibrant connective tissue of an ESN, with all its rich user profiles, relationships between far flung connections, countless groups of local experts, reams of searchable open knowledge, and the deep insight that all these can provide to step in for the shockingly rapid loss of our physical world of work.

ESN/Community Practitioners and Executive Leaders: It’s Time to Seize the Day

To practitioners, I’ve started making it clear that this is a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime and historic opportunity to make your enterprise social network save the day when it comes to grounding and delivering a healthy remote organization. An effective ESN can connecting the organization back to itself far better than older tools by focusing on returning and then improving both the cultural “dial tone” and daily bustle of the organization. The practical benefits are significant: Actual outcome-based business impact by improving operations, productivity, and employee engagement. So this is your time to shine, whether you now need to develop an ESN and the communities within it, or supercharge the one that you have.

For business leaders, now is the time to put your organization on a modern digital platform that is far more resilient to disruption and that will both modernize it and make it much more effective. I encourage you to look at the baseline results you’re likely to get, which was published in the MIT Sloan Management Review. Worst case is that you’ll achieve about a 25% productivity increase for your investment, which is fairly modest compared to CRM or ERP systems. You will however be required to invest in more staff than is typical for a traditional IT solution (the why and how many is here, but it’s not large compared to major productivity losses for remote workers without a strong supporting network.) Don’t wait. Support the ESN and online community champions trying to help you.

For both, this is the time to learn that advanced preparedness for going all digital is critical. We live in exponential times of change, and this also seems to mean large and more frequent disruptions. Those with the healthiest, best connected, and engaged digital networks of workers will experience the least disarray and breakdown when major events like coronavirus take place. Let’s learn from not making the most of these powerful tools the first time around. It’s now time to fully commit to building the best possible connected organization for next time around.

Final Note: Before you ask me about why ESNs and not team chat apps like Slack or Microsoft Teams, it’s because the ESN scales conversations and engagement up to the size of the enterprise. Almost all orgs are already using Slack and Teams, and it gives them a much narrower and far more limited view of what’s happening. In an ESN, all contributions are visible by default across the whole organization, content types are more sophisticated, and as you can see below in additional reading, they can be used for advance change processes like enterprise-wide digital transformation. ESNs are strategic. Team chat is useful, but tactical.

Additional Reading

Using Online Community for Digital Transformation

More Evidence Online Community is Central to the Future of Work

My Future of Work Trends for 2020 (with Video)

Filed under Analysis, Digital Workplace, Social Business, Social Collaboration, Strategy Tagged with , , , , , ,

In Digital Transformation, The Art-of-the-Possible and Average Practice Are Diverging

October 6, 2017 Leave a comment

I’ve long noticed an interesting phenomena when it comes to more fully digitizing our organizations. Namely, that it mostly looks like what other organizations have already been doing. Because we are all almost entirely still early pioneers in a brave new technologically-infused world, this shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Since there are an almost infinite number of directions we could go, copying that which we see that works well just makes good sense.

This herd mentality of digital actually has numerous causes: Proven best practices for digital are too few and far between, successful experiments are often hoarded for competitive motivations, digital innovators by definition take on often untenable risks we’d prefer to avoid, and perhaps most of all, we are still trying to get used to the rapid pace of learning that digital requires to stay abreast.

A big reason for this state of affairs is because digital is inherently complex in its realization, intangible by nature (thus it can be hard to study and assess), and difficult to actually understand in context since it’s now so deeply connected to everything else today. This makes it hard to identify the root cause of any desired effects. Combined with the slow rate of change in people when it comes the requisite shifts in culture, skill, and inclination for new digital ways of working, and the result has been a clustering of most organizations around a similar level of digital maturity: Relatively low.

Digital Maturity: Technology Is Driving the Leaders and Laggards Apart

Digital Maturity is a Team Sport

This was made evident a little while back when McKinsey published their in-depth analysis of 150 representative organizations around the world and their digital maturity in 18 dimensions (see graph above.) It uncovered a wide range of digital maturity, but most notably revealed a sort of inverse Lake Wobegon effect, where most organizations were in fact performing well below average.

In other words, average practice is steadily and inexorably diverging from the art-of-the-possible in an exponentially changing era of technology evolution. This is leaving a great deal of space for leaders to find the leaps forward that are dramatically better and thereby own the market opportunities.

Yet, we also know that when applied for its unique strengths — for faster growth, better engagement, reducing friction in commerce, improved efficiency, and so on — technology can be a tremendous force multiplier (something noted about a decade ago by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson), propelling the leaders that focus carefully on these strengths far head of the laggards. This gap is real, which we can see from the data above, and it’s growing quickly in my experience.

Nevertheless, whether I look at the digital workplace, customer experience, or digital transformation efforts that I’ve been involved in over the years, I tend to see the same thing: The application of average practice that, while proven, will assuredly put most organizations into the also-ran list and fail to propel them forward digitally in a meaningful way.

Over time, this has led me to ask what the digital leaders are actually doing that has gotten them much farther out ahead. In short, my ultimate analysis is that they appear to be learning better and faster about digital in key ways — and from a larger variety of sources — than most other organizations. They also then apply these lessons effectively to their business. Digital leaders tend to eagerly gather lessons and evidence broadly and early, especially outside their organizations. Without this, they are limited to what they’re able to learn linearly on their own, through solely their own efforts. There is also good evidence that this is what most organizations do that have survived a long time, from the work of Shell’s Arie de Geus (and which I frequently cite in my keynotes and talks):

These companies were particularly tolerant of activities in the margin: outliers, experiments and eccentricities within the boundaries of the cohesive firm, which kept stretching their understanding of possibilities.

This same line of reasoning has led industry colleagues like John Hagel to conclude that scalable learning, especially across organizations as Don Tapscott has noted in his research on Global Solution Networks, is essentially the only sustainable competitive advantage. But as I mentioned above, competitors usually don’t like to share lessons learned, and it’s often hard to transfer lessons from one style of organization to another, say across industries or geographies.

The key existential question now is this: How can we use today’s capabilities to learn much better as organizations?

Overcoming Digital Transformation Maturity Barrier with Community Learning, Outsourcing, and Copying for Fast Follower

Three Roads Over the Digital Maturity Barrier

How then are digital leaders overcoming the digital maturity better? In my experience, they are doing one of several things that allows them to pool their digital experiences and investments, then tap much more widely and sustainably into shared lessons learned that they can each use and quickly build upon:

  • Community learning. Non-competitors can come together across organizations to share their digital knowledge and lessons learned, and especially, tackle digital challenges too big even for large enterprises. This kind of cross-entity learning primary comes in three forms, though there are numerous ways to do it: Industry consortiums, which we’ve long had, as well as more digital versions of consortiums such as collaborative multi-organizational Networks of Excellence and of course, the aforementioned Global Solution Networks. These require the highest level of effort but are also the most sustainable, effective, and most likely to reduce the risk of disruption by truly capturing and wielding collective intelligence.
  • Outsourcing. Pull in expertise gleaned from hundreds or thousands of other companies by building on someone else’s mature and evolving ecosystem or digital blueprints. Amazon’s cloud stack and Apple’s iOS platform are great examples of this that countless companies are using today (Netflix using Amazon, for an industry leading example), while increasingly we’re seeing industry blueprints emerging for digital transformation of their entire organization. See the overview of my Digital Transformation Target Platforms ShortList for some details on blueprints.
  • Copying the Leaders. This has long been a corporate strategy of so-called fast followers and it works well for some. This approach basically uses 3rd party investments, discoveries, and exposure to risk in an arbitrage fashion, for their own benefit, picking and choosing what works and avoiding the downsides almost entirely, though some have certainly criticized the fast follower approach, others have cited organizations like Samsung as becoming market leaders by using it. Although technically another form of outsourcing, this model also works in a group of competitors. Downside: You won’t have any “moon shots” or big digital breakthroughs on your own and so you’re still at high risk of disruption.

Clearly, this list is in rough order of preference, though all are workable strategies and will likely be used in combination. That said, the vast majority of organizations are taking the easier routes of the second and third items on the list. This means letting Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and SAP pathfind their future and build on their capabilities/ecosystems, or being content to cherry pick from the successful digital pioneers and hopefully to attain success in that way.

Digital Maturity Requires Harnessing Collective Intelligence

The third way (first on the list), which I see more advanced and mature organizations engaging in, is to work far smarter by combining knowledge, investment, and experience as whole together, creating a network that can learn many times faster than a single entity. The competitive issues can and are usually worked out.

Are there good examples of multi-stakeholder learning? Yes. Some of the most strategic can be found in the list of known Global Solution Networks, but others that I’ve had personal experience with are the famed Fraunhofer Society, open source software projects (many people/organizations coming together to collaborate on common goals via shared technology innovation and development, and the American Society of Association Executives (and indeed, the entire professional association space, which is becoming increasingly digitized and community-centric.)

There is also a fourth route, which many will observe seems to be the case with certain top digital firms: Hire the smartest people on the planet and turn them loose. This is certainly possible, but it’s also an unsustainable zero sum game that the vast majority of organizations simply don’t have as an option to employ (the smartest people always work for someone else, it has been observed.) Instead, we need additional options for reaching digital maturity that are generally attainable by most of us.

Thus, in the flat and hyper-competitive world of the Internet, average practice is just not sufficient to thrive, nor to survive. Organizations must find ways to learn and evolve faster, more widely, and with much more scale than in the past. Cultivating change agents has emerged as one such way to actually achieve this, but these actors need a steady stream of knowledge on emerging new practices in order to drive the organization forward. This is through scalable learning.

As Scott Brinker’s now-famous law (Martec’s Law) tells us, technology changes exponentially but organizations only change logarithmically. The good news is that it’s very much not clear if this is an inherent limitation of organizations, or that’s just that way because of how we have traditionally learned and changed in the past. From my experience in the field of mass collaboration, my view is that it’s almost certainly the latter. There we now have new and better ways to change if we choose to use them.

The reality is that if we don’t find ways to change more rapidly and effectively, the results are potentially calamitous for us as enterprises and institutions. Fortunately, we now have powerful new tools to apply when it comes to digital learning and change. I believe these approaches may be enough for most organizations for now. If it’s not however, I remain confident that we will find even more and better ways to evolve and grow. The digital future is bright, if we’re ready to learn.

Additional Reading

Using Online Community for Digital Transformation | Slideshare Storytelling Version

How Should Organizations Actually Go About Digital Transformation?

The Eight Essential Digital Strategies

Digital Transformation and the Leadership Quandary

Let the Network Do the Work

The Hardest Lesson of Digital Transformation: Designing for Loss of Control

The emerging case for open business methods | ZDNet

The Top Business Trends for the New C-Suite in 2017
(See: Digital Transformation Programs, Change Agent Initiatives, etc.)

Filed under Analysis, Digital Transformation, Online Community, Strategy, The Enterprise

What We Know About Making Enterprise Social Networks Successful Today

March 2, 2017 8 Comments

It’s a little hard to believe that it’s been over ten years now since the first early enterprise social networks (ESN) emerged on the market to make their initial forays into our organizations. They showed us then — and I believe even more now today — the bright new possibilities for how we might work together in more innovative and effective ways by becoming fundamentally better connected organizations.

We’ve certainly learned a great deal along the way through thousands of ESN deployments around the world since that time. I have tracked or been involved in a good many of these types of efforts over the years, and so I thought I’d revisit what I believe that we’ve learned so far from the more successful efforts. Sharing this knowledge is vital now, as I still see many practitioners starting almost from scratch. That’s because there is still no single source of knowledge on what works best when it comes to being successful in crafting a next-generation digital workplace with an ESN.

Note: We do have a useful body of industry knowledge now, but it’s currently spread out and must be put together to create a fully integrated picture. The three sources I that think are the most valuable currently are a) the Community Roundtable‘s annual State of the Community Management report, the latest edition of which I explored on ZDNet a little while back, b) Jane McConnell’s excellent Organization in the Digital Age report, and lastly, c) Vanessa Dimauro’s various work at Leader Networks, such as her new Business Impact of Communities report.

Making an Enterprise Social Network Thrive

Looking in the ESN Mirror: Far Too Much Attention on the Tools

Early makers of enterprise social networks such as Jive, Newsgator, and Socialtext blazed the trail initially, making it possible for workers to engage in truly open and self-organizing collaboration by adapting the social networking model that had worked so well in the consumer world to the enterprise. In particular, these early offerings were based on the early successes of consumer social media and social networking, namely services like Facebook and MySpace, as well highly successful online communities for business like the SAP Community Network. While wikis and blogs were the first genuine contemporary social software used in businesses (groupware, and arguably e-mail were actually the very first social tools), it was the social networking model that ultimately became the leading one.

Eventually, the hard knocks of marketplace competition ultimately led to the domination of the top part of the industry by a few players that executed well: IBM (with Connections and a host of associated platforms), Microsoft (with Yammer, Sharepoint, and now Groups, and probably Teams as well), Salesforce (with Chatter/Community Cloud), and finally Jive as the only truly dedicated enterprise player still standing from the inception of the industry.

But as useful as these platforms were and are in helping enable the right changes in digital workplace mindset and behavior, it was never the technology that was the hardest part. In fact, one of the clearest lessons from the first decade of the rise of the ESN was that virtually all of the major challenges with ESN success are about people, not technology. Making enterprise social networks thrive by fostering stronger, richer connections across organization silos while spurring widespread knowledge sharing and co-creation is an activity that is almost entirely made successful by how you situate the tools among the people involved, what skills you develop amongst them, and the type of goals, encouragement, support, and leadership you establish.

Thus, in the realm of digital collaboration, people come first and technology is second. In fact, I’ve often argued that organizations can actually become effective social businesses without any additional technology at all, like W.L. Gore (10,000 employees, $3.2B revenue) with its famously flat, open and self-organizing culture which was a social businesses long before the technology arrived. (They have since adopted the ESNs as one of their core tools.)

A Signature Lesson: People Must Change with the Tech, So Guide Them

I’d even go as far as to say this (to borrow a concept from the Internet of Things): The enterprise social network actually creates a side-by-side virtual “twin” of your organization, one that is more natural, organic, collaborative, scalable, and self-organizing. The digital twin represented by your ESN must therefore be nurtured in the same way as your business is (because it is the business too.)

Just like you’d never let your organization operate without a well-articulated vision, a relentless focus on growth and development, regular investment in better performance, careful strategic oversight, and passionate involvement by leadership as well as the rank and file, your ESN can’t lack for these elements either.

Thus, here’s the short list of the top factors I now believe drive success with enterprise social networks today. By and large, these factors are not technological in nature, though they often are highly reflective of — and can be directly aided by — the technology environment in which they operate. Instead these success factors represent the foundational types of human activities and skills that helps organizations more readily tap into the increasingly well understood benefits of operating as a social business. Lack more than a couple of these factors, and your ESN isn’t likely to be much of an improvement over say, an e-mail or unified communications system, in terms of the truly differentiated impact it can have.

The Hard Won Lessons of Thriving ESNs

  • Purposeful use case design. Unlike generic communications systems, enterprise social networks perform at their best when they’re designed around specific business activities. While having user profiles, activity streams, groups, and posts at a basic level is useful in itself — and that’s what ESN platforms offer out of the box — it’s designing for specific use cases like budgeting, recruiting, supply chain exception management, and dozens of other key activities where the real business value and impact comes in. For example, I am seeing a strong push in many ESN efforts this year to help teams collaborate more effectively in the field, particularly with sales teams, as that function matters a great deal to most businesses and is one of the best ways to demonstrate value early on. But the user experience of the ESN must be extended to natively support these use cases and make them better. This generally means bespoke experiences that extend and expand the ESN to realize the highest value use cases in an optimized way, instead of hoping that generic, out-of-the-box ESN functions will somehow enable them. While most ESN platforms have tools and APIs that make this relatively straightforward, I find that most practitioners expect that their ESN will do most of what is needed out of the box.

    This is simply not the case today. In fact, some of the most compelling examples of ESN solutions are found when specific high impact use cases are enabled through purposeful design, such as with custom-designed Plus Relocation’s Elo community, which lies at the very core of how they run their business, or the Milwaukee School of Engineering’s Bridge platform, which greatly accelerates the admission process via a carefully designed and gameified experience. All of this began to be understood back in 2011 when a widely discussed post by Laurie Buczek noted from her efforts at Intel were far too disconnected from the actual work of the business to matter very much. Well-known analysts in the ESN space such as Constellation’s Alan Lepofsky identified purposeful collaboration as a key success factor back in 2013. Attached below are a sample of the some of the functional use cases that enterprise social networks can be dramatically improved through open collaboration, which I’ll be exploring in more detail soon:
    enterprise_social_networks_business_use_cases_for_social_business

  • Professional community management. I am sometimes surprised how often I still encounter a poor appreciation of the vital importance of capable community management — see TheCR’s skill wheel to understand how involved a job it is — in ensuring the long-term growth and success of an ESN. Last year I even wrote an open letter, aimed at the IT department which often does the technology implementation for an ESN (and gets charged about half the time with actually operating it), about the criticality of developing this strategic social business capability. Short version: Digital communities are a new type of entity requiring a new form of support and enablement. Do not use interns for this, don’t use the inexperienced, don’t add it to someone’s already busy day job. Instead, use experienced professionals, like you would with any other important business function. Outsource if you have to (what I call Community Management as a Service.) Invest early and plan for the long hual as the Community Roundtable has correlated it directly with the maturity level of an ESN effort.
  • Working out loud. Of all the digital skills that workers should be developing now, perhaps the one that most naturally is an onramp to most of the others and leads to both positive outcomes and compelling emergent results is the act of working out loud (WOL) in digital channels. John Stepper’s Working Out Loud book and his push for organizations to create WOL circles to build skills around the technique is probably the best place to start. My industry colleague Michelle Ockers recently posted some fascinating insights into how WOL can work with actual results from a large organization. In short, working out loud will develop vital network leadership skills, cultivate social capital, and produce higher level of knowledge sharing, collaboration, and institutional knowledge, to name just a few of the benefits by virtue of simple and straightforward daily activities in the ESN.
    Working Out Loud Fundamentals for an Enterprise Social Network
  • Network leadership. As organizations become more virtual, decentralized, and digitally-enabled, it will be in social tools that leadership will soon be wielded most effectively. Managing our organizations through digital networks has become an essential skill, just not one that we’re training for in most organizations yet, and now we must. The majority of ESN deployments spend very little time developing these skills or educating team leaders, managers, and executives in the basic skills of network leadership, yet are often surprised when highly meaningful and impactful activity to the organization doesn’t take place there.
  • Digital collaboration skill development. In general, organizations are not developing the human skills as much as they are developing their digital workplace technologies. Almost every ESN effort I have encountered is under-delivering in some way on building the new skills required to get the most from social collaboration, as it depends on very different thinking such as letting the network do the work and designing your work processes for loss of control. These needn’t be — and shouldn’t be — complex digital skill education programs. Collaborate with your learning and development team and build some lightweight digital collaboration skill development content (videos, quick starts), add ESN education to new hire onboarding, cultivate WOL circles, and then evangelize and educate at every opportunity across the organization.
  • Supportive and engaged senior stakeholders. Perhaps the fastest and most effective way to get traction and sustain success with an ESN is to have active and fully participative leadership. This means both support and sponsorship as well as active presence in the enterprise social network itself. One of the first thing ESN practitioners should focus on is landing at least two senior executives willing to lend their reputation and standing in the organization to the effort. How important is this really? In the Community Roundtable’s survey data, year-after-year, it generally comes in as a top two factor, so it’s high on the importance scale.
  • Guardrails on activities that impede being a connected company. There are some easy ways that organizations can inadvertently reduce the benefits of social collaboration. One of the top ones is making it too easy to create private groups in the ESN. This is easy to remedy, if you’re aware of it: Leading social business exemplars like Bosch require users to submit a business case for private groups as a “tax” to place friction on keeping information hidden. Not retiring aging digital channels that are less open and participative can also be factor, as workers will initially tend to gravitate back to the tools and channels they know. In general, be diligent in not breaking FLATNESSES, which is a more detailed mnemonic I adapted from Andrew McAfee’s initial SLATES mnemonic describing what makes social tools different and more powerful than what came before.

ESNs are about people + digital technology: Focus in that order

Are there other success factors? Sure, and they vary widely depending on the organization, its culture, inclinations, and level of digital competency. If you want a deeper drive, I previously explored in detail, by pulling from several dozen client studies and industry case examples, what early adoption success patterns for ESNs were, since that phase was what most organizations were focused on then. We’ve learned some additional lessons since then — most of which are summarized above — but it’s still a useful breakdown if you need more techniques to drive success.

Does all of this sound overly complex? Not really. Social technologies themselves are getting very good at making the fundamentals easier, while there is a growing body of knowledge that can be used as a template for the structures and processes one needs to put into place. I’ve previous explored the structure side several times, both in terms of specific roles and organizational capability, while the process side is well-depicted in aforementioned community manager skill wheel.

In short, never before has it been easier to adopt enterprise social networks and achieve significant impact. It just takes a focus on what matters most, which is a steady choreography that consists of shifting human skills and supporting collaboration technologies together towards business goals. I now believe that most organization can get to ESN success quickly and repeatably, but only if they assess and adequately address the full dimension of people and technology concerns required.

Additional Reading

How Social Technology has Emerged as an Enterprise Management Model

Can we achieve a better, more effective digital workplace?

Filed under Analysis, collaboration, Digital Workplace, Online Community, Social Business, Social Collaboration, The Enterprise, The Future of Work

Using Online Community for Digital Transformation

November 18, 2016 7 Comments

Driving successful change in a large organization has always been one of the most difficult activities in business. But for those who are principally tasked with carrying their organizations forward into the digital future, they are currently facing perhaps the single most challenging large-scale enterprise activity of our time. One has only to look at the short-list of needed technology adaptations to recognize the true extent of the challenge.

Part of this is because digital itself is so intangible. It’s hard to understand all the moving parts of the vast technology stacks, ecosystems, and platforms that now surround us because it’s hard to discern them. It’s often even harder to understand the diverse needs, perspectives, and skill gaps of the people that have to change along with the technology.

Thus the popular topic of digital transformation has come full circle back to the change process itself, largely because we’ve found our existing toolkit to be entirely unsatisfactory. For example, we already know that the vast majority of strategic change initiatives employing traditional methods don’t succeed. We also have an increasingly good sense of why this is, and a big part of the reason is that centralized processes break in exponential times (see Martec’s Law.) They quickly become overwhelmed by the scale and dynamics of the necessary change processes, which have to keep adapting and updating themselves in near real-time to stay relevant, often in windows that are hardly more than weeks today.

Enabling Digital Transformation at Scale with Online Community

Consequently, we’ve seen steadily emerging models for change that go well beyond the strategic initiative, the center of excellence, or incubator to push out change into a much broader set of minds and hands, far beyond what we’ve normally employed to drive change previously. I now believe that unless organizations greatly expand the notion of who is involved in change, who can drive it, and how they are enabled, empowered, and supported, they will largely underperform with digital transformation.

To determine how scalable digital change can best be realized and figure out what kind of forward-thinking constructs will be required, I’ve been experimenting for the last several years with employing the very same models that we use to engage in the digital world, to cultivate and foster more dynamic change processes. The ideas of social business and online community, which show how the most scalable, cost-effective, and rich model for working is to enable the network to do the work. I’ve now come to understand that in digital transformation, we have to let the network do the work. Put simply, there is no practical way to achieve the pace and breadth of transformation required in exponential times without using exponential tools.

In the last few years, I’ve been using online community as the platform for change, instead of creating traditional centrally-staffed change programs, and found it far more effective in general. I am not the only one that believes this is a key path forward towards new types of highly potent change models. This is an industry-wide discovery and conversation we are beginning to see emerge in general. We have moved beyond the center of excellence model, which we’ve learned soon bogs down and largely fails to address the scope of enterprise-wide change activities, to a new model I’ve called the network of excellence, for lack of a better term.

Realizing that we need to scale change on a platform

I’m not alone in thinking along these lines. For example, well-known management thinker Gary Hamel has been promulgating this very same idea, entirely independently. My industry colleague John Hagel has also been writing about many related concepts, most recently about how we can scale learning in an exponential world. The highly regarded CIO of the Federal Communications Commission, David Bray, spends a tremendous amount of his energy using social media and other channels to talk about how to broadly enable digital change agents and “intrapreneurs.” There are still others exploring this topic as well.

The subject of learning in particular is a vital one to this conversation. That’s because unless we’re prepared to radically restaff our organizations, mass education for the digital era is required to help our organizations as a whole shift our thinking, behavior, and culture. Great communication is essential also, as we’re learning it is the leading success factor in driving effective change. Both of these activities are best realized using today’s modern digital communications and collaboration tools designed for very high scale, leverage, and asynchronicity: Online communities and enterprise social networks.

While I’ve been “experimenting” with new open methods with real transformation efforts in enterprises to the extent I can the last few years, an emerging model for how to structure and wield online communities to drive these kinds of change has begun to present itself. Far from being a proprietary new way of driving large scale change, I now see that this model, and similar ones like it, are the inevitable direction that change will take.

In the very same way that open source software communities eventually transformed how most software was developed and social media revolutionized how most media content was created, and we see the same advances in crowdfunding and other crowdsourcing methods, the very same shift is now happening to our organizations’ change processes. They are becoming more decentralized, more empowering, diverse, and resource rich by using digital connections to enable wide-scale learning, alignment, communications, and execution around a change process. They are even allowing local actors — and often now even external agents (see open APIs, developer networks, hackathons, startup partnerships, etc.) — to pick up the tools, processes, and lessons learned to change their part of the organization.

Early lessons in using online community for digital change

While the methods and approach we are using to connect together change agents in a community to organize around and realize strategic change are very much still emerging, I can say from experience now that the following is generally required:

  • A community platform. This is a digital forum within which digital change agents will collaborate on and effect change, formulating plans, making joint decisions, and carrying out their efforts, often in very self-organized ways.
  • Facilitation. This is by applying what industry colleagues like Rich Millington refer to as strategic community management, actively facilitating the change process, ensuring those who get stuck get the help they need, and empowering, educating, and orchestrating many points of top-down and bottom-up change across the community, and therefore across the organization.
  • Learning. The community as a whole becomes a massive learning repository, a sort of self-documenting and emergent MOOC for digital transformation adapted to the organization, with lessons learned and best practices culled by facilitators and spread to change agents.
  • Empowerment. A community of transformation spreads knowledge, resources, know-how, and collective energy, enabled by sponsorship, capabilities, staff, and a mandate from the highest levels of the organization.
  • Communications. With rapid change comes an absolute requirement for transparency and clear, open communication. These traits are the natural attributes of an online community, as everyone can see what’s happening and why. As I cited above, this is the top factor for successful transformation.
  • Co-creation. The strongest, swiftest change happens is when there is alignment locally and globally on what needs to be done. Then everyone comes together to put together their ideas and resources to drive digital change.

I invite you to collaborate with me as the digital transformation world begins to adopt the same digital forces of open participation that have remade many industries now, and apply them deeply to our practices and frameworks. For just as the old, plodding, limited, and bandwidth-starved methods of central production are no match whatsoever for today’s methods of digital peer production, failure to adapt has very significant competitive and existential consequences. In short, online community is one of the most powerful methods for achieving almost any large-scale human endeavor, and so I’m pleased to see it arrive to help with digital change.

Can most organizations achieve this? Well, we do know that organizations can’t change unless their leaders change with them, so I do hope so.

Postscript: I’d be remiss in not citing Don Tapscott’s excellent work in identifying and promulgating Global Solution Networks as perhaps the most strategic form of using community to drive large scale learning and change at an intra-institutional, consortia, industry, government, and NGO level.

Additional Reading

A change platform is a priority of the CIO in 2016

Going Beyond ‘Bolt-On’ Digital Transformation

Is it IT’s last chance to lead digital transformation?

Filed under Analysis, Digital Transformation, Online Community, Peer Production, Social Business, Strategy, The Enterprise

In Digital Transformation, Culture Change Goes Hand in Hand with Tech Change

October 20, 2016 4 Comments

I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years identifying the best approaches for that urgent enterprise topic of our time, digital transformation. When I first started, I often looked to top examples of organizations that have started the transition and made good progress (see sample case studies below.) More recently I’ve derived insights from my work directly with a number of organizations on their individual transformation journeys.

Ultimately, however, I have determined that the short answer is one that you might expect: There is no single blueprint for transformation that works well for everyone.

Instead, the right steps very much depend on the organization itself. We also know now that there are indeed common success factors we can apply, if we can adapt them to our organizations. Generally, I’ve found that the best method is to employ heuristics on an established framework that takes an organization’s industry traits, cultural inclinations, organizational strengths/weaknesses and uses a generative process to create a starting point for change.

The resulting adapted framework is informed by best practices and industry lessons learned so far. A good place to start for these is Perry Hewitt’s 10 best practices for digital transformation, which she developed when she was Chief Digital Officer at Harvard.

The framework is balanced so it does not focus too much on technology or change management. In fact, the starting point must be one that steadily shifts both the technology foundation and the people of the organization in unison towards both planned goals and emergent opportunities. This starting point then continues to evolve as the organization learns from early experience. The overall process usually works best when realized on a supporting platform that enables open communication, enterprise-wide learning, digital channel leadership, stakeholder empowerment, and enablement of a network of change agents across the organization. This is the change platform I’ve been discussing in the industry lately, and is typically an online and offline community of practice.

The Stages of Culture Change for Digital Transformation

Rapid, Sustainable Digital Change Requires a Platform

Having an effective change platform is critical, as it’s the people side of digital transformation that is the hardest part by far, which we can clearly see from a great set of recent data by Jane McConnell. Far and away the most significant challenge is getting the organization to collaborate across functions and silos, given disparate priorities, timelines, and lack of mutual familiarity. Without this, fragmented results and disjointed digital experiences are too often the outcome. It’s only by having a common and participatory venue to discuss, plan, and execute that effective transformation can take place. Thus, as Ron Miller has noted: Digital transformation takes true organization-wide commitment.

I typically employ a cultural change map — generically presented above, but adapted to the specific organization — to communicate some of the key aspects of mindset that has to shift to support digital transformation efforts.

The digital transformation effort then uses strategic education, mentoring, and specific activities (these might be hackathons, MOOCs, certification efforts, reverse mentoring, and #changeagents outreach) to proactively shift mindset across the organization and build the requisite digital skills and ideas. These include counter-intuitive notions that can be hard to otherwise learn: Designing advantageously for loss of control and using the intrinsic strengths of digital technology to change more rapidly and scale out faster.

As the organization comes together and engages together on the change platform, it then generates the framework to identify their starting point and guide the ongoing process using rigorous measurement and action-taking, which are two other key success factors, though proactive communication remains the most important action to take (again, why the change platform is so critical).

An Adaptable Framework for Digital Transformation

Communication isn’t sufficient by itself however. Effective action is required. The digital transformation framework above is therefore also very focused on day-to-day operations supported by an ongoing redesign of core business processes that is adjusted continously through early data from careful measurement of early prototypes and pilots. Of course, there are more details involved, but this is the high-level process that I’ve both used and seen work at large organizations to close the execution gap and create sustained and successful transformation.

Leading digital transformation case studies

Burberry’s All Encompassing Approach to Digital Transformation

Travelex and Their Digital Transformation: Communicate, communicate, communicate

How Nordstrom executed cross-silo digital transformation for the long haul

How Tesco used a diverse “community of colleagues” to drive digital transformation

Additional Reading

The Building Blocks of Digital Transformation

What Organizations Should Do in the First 100 Days of Digital Transformation

New Methods Leaders Can Use to Drive Digital Transformation

Filed under Digital Transformation, Online Community, Strategy, The Enterprise, Uncategorized

Vital Trends in Digital Experience and Transformation in 2016

October 12, 2016 1 Comment

This year I was invited again to come to Dreamforce in San Francisco and present on the latest developments in digital experience and digital transformation for the conference’s Emerging Tech Trends track. Surprisingly well-attended given the satellite location of the track at the Hilton Union Square, having to prepare this session is always a good opportunity for me to go over my research in the last year and map out what’s likely going to happen next.

For myself at least, it’s clear that human change has become closely linked to and as important as digital change, so I have divided up the trends list in the last two years into a tech dimension and a human dimension.

The bottom line: How we think, work, and react as people has tremendous impact on the usefulness and effectiveness of emerging technology. It’s what separates the digital native from those who are just beginning the journey. For example, those not inclined to share information won’t get much use from the technologies and techniques of social business, nor will those who are uncomfortable and unused to spending time in virtual worlds be able to take advantage of the rich opportunities of virtual reality. And if we’re not changing our leadership skills to be more network-centric as opposed to hierarchy-centric, then much of the business value of digital experience and engagement is wasted on us. The list goes on.

What’s more, not only are we co-evolving with our tech, but we need to understand how we need to change just as much as the technology is changing. This is required in order to a) understand the art of the possible and b) to be able to access technology’s unique and historic new value propositions.

What's Next in Digital and Social Experience and Digital Transformation in 2016

Another point I make early in the presentation is the technology is changing exponentially right now and has climbed into a rather steep part of the curve, yet our organizations just don’t change on the same curve. Instead, we change far more linearly, at best logarithmically (see slide 8.) That’s not to say that that enterprises can’t organize themselves to change much faster, but in order to do so we must employ fundamentally new ways to transform organizations. Certainly, some organizations are adapting faster and digital transforming more sustainably (see data on slide 4.)

Sidebar: I’ve recently been exploring what these new models for sustainable yet highly scalable models for digital transformation, even proving them out on client projects I’ve been working on over the last few years. The key seems to be a more network-based, decentralized, and emergent approach I’ve called a Network of Excellence.

Emergent Tech Trends Inputs

For this year’s round-up of emerging tech trends, in addition to original research, I used as inputs several items:

Major new additions to the list include digital assistants/bots/chatbots, blockchain, omnichannel, workplace app integration, and collaborative EMRs, along with significant tweaks in a variety of the existing trends.

You can see the whole deck with an overview of each trend on Slideshare. I’ll post any video that is produced as well.

Also, in other Dreamforce news, you can review my live blog of the main Dreamforce keynote as well as my current assessment this week of the Salesforce platform and ecosystem.

Additional Reading

Digital priorities for the CIO in 2016 | ZDNet

The Building Blocks of Digital Transformation: Community, Tech, Business Models, and a Change Platform

Filed under Analysis, Digital Experience, Digital Transformation, Digital Workplace, Social Business, Strategy, The Enterprise, The Future of Work, Trends and Statistics Tagged with , , , , ,

The Building Blocks of Digital Transformation: Community, Tech, Business Models, and a Change Platform

June 18, 2016 Leave a comment

I’ve been making the argument lately that the single largest obstacle in successful digital transformation is change itself. Surprisingly, the arrival of new technology is generally not the large hurdle to becoming more digital in a meaningful way, though it certainly represents a large and growing learning curve. Yet learning the new technology is manageable by most organizations in my experience, if they have the will to do so.

Finding the right business models can be a bit more of a challenge, but the process of discovering the best ones is increasingly well understood these days. One somewhat ironic lesson is that we’ve also learned that we usually have to build an audience first, often well before we decide on new digital business models, that are centered around some activity or capability of significant shared interest with the market, before we can experiment and find the right path forward in terms of generating value, such as revenue from sales, subscriptions, advertising, etc.

Online Communities Are the Business Construct That Create the Most Value

From my Enterprise Digital Summit 2016 Paris Keynote Deck

Why Digital Needs a New Mindset

It actually turns out the most important and challenging building blocks for digital transformation is people and the processes that can change them. Thinking in digital terms requires a significant shift in mindset, such as designing for loss of control, understanding the power laws of mass connectedness, the startling revelation that the network will do most of the work, and understanding how open participation is the key to unleashing digital value in scale to our businesses.

However, shifting the mindset en masse of the large number people that exist in the average enterprise (i.e. tens or even hundreds of thousands of workers) is not something that can be done to them, but can only be done with them as Euan Semple frequently likes to point out. So, what’s the single best venue in which to engage significantly in a time efficient and sustainable fashion? I now suggest that the most likely and cost-effective vehicle for this that we know today is online community.

The building blocks of digital transformation is a topic that I recently had time to study in depth as I prepared my closing keynote for the always terrific Enterprise Digital Summit 2016 (formerly the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT) in Paris this month.

Step 1: Gather Stakeholders into Communities of Digital Change

The fundamental building block of digital transformation is therefore not technology, but people, a much more challenging proposition. However, if we can somehow connect the collective workforce in the organization together in an effective fashsion to begin a shared and dialogue-based process of learning, understanding, experimenting with, and then carrying out the tasks of digital transformation across the enterprise as a much more aligned and self-supporting way, then we are much more likely to succeed. As I’ve discussed, we’ve even started to witness evidence that IT is shifting in this direction steadily, with the rise of empowered change agents and even unexpected source of pre-existing tech change using forces like shadow IT as a key resource for creating decentralized technology adaptation across the organization.

But it all starts with community, for which I believe the evidence is now clear is the most powerful way of organizing human activity and creating shared value yet developed.

Step 2: Assemble a Modern, Market-Facing Technology Stack

From there, we do need to look at the technology lens at what our business does and how it does it. We can no longer realize all tech change ourselves, as our competitors have already learned that the single greatest force for value creation is capturing and wielding community contributions of customers by the millions via mass co-creation, and business partners by the thousands (see APIs + hackathons). I recently summarized the many other emerging enterprise technologies we must consider all the time as well, but the most important ones are customer facing and involved in co-creation.

We therefore must instead now becoming highly competent in building strong and effective architectures of participation, as most digital leaders harness the vast capacity of the Internet to do most of the value creation:

The Digital Business Stack: Marketplace Driven Engagement & Value Creation

Step 3: Create and Nurture Digital Experiments

From there we can combine people-led digital change at scale with a portfolio of digital engagement and experience technologies and processes — that must prominently include market-facing community — to begin creating, launching, and growing healthy and vibrant new products and services. Growing hacking in fact, has become an important new technique used by top Internet companies to ensure early lift and adoption, and has been a key subject of interest by top technology leaders like Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. So grow the results of digital transformation this way, then generate revenue:

Digitally Transforming a Business with Growth Hacking, Business Models, and Community

Step 4: Get Serious About Revenue Models

Finally, the last building block is digital business models, which one the service has a successful audience or community, can be experimented with and validated, though certainly some services, such as sharing economy ones, can monetize from the outset, though often at break even levels. Below is a representative list of some of the most common Internet business models, though by no means all the possibilities. For example, there are at least 18 separate known business models for open APIs alone. The high level Internet business models break down like so:

Common Internet Business Models

For a more complete exploration, please view the video of my closing keynote on this subject in Paris on June 2nd, 2016:

Or download a copy of the Slideshare deck that I presented with.

Additional Reading

How IT Can Change For the Digital Era and What Leaders Can Do About It

The digital transformation conversation shifts to how

Filed under Analysis, Digital Experience, Digital Transformation, Events, Network Effects, Online Community, Peer Production, Strategy, The Enterprise

More Evidence Online Community is Central to the Future of Work

June 5, 2016 1 Comment

Within the last month, two new industry reports have been released that shed important new light on how we’re going to be organizing and operating our organizations in the coming years. Many of you know my point of view in this regard: Social technology has at this point largely transformed the consumer world, yet the increasingly outdated digital landscape of business frequently continues to rely on creaky and rather limited technologies such as e-mail, document repositories, intranets, file sharing, and so on. So it’s always instructive to see how far we’ve actually come in places, and how much we have left to go.

The first report is The Community Roundtable’s excellent annual State of Community Management for 2016. While I’ll provide a fuller write-up on ZDNet soon, it’s clear from this report that the model of online community continues to rise in prominence and attention as a superior operating model for activities that involve a large number of people that have common interests and need to work together on shared objectives.

As my industry colleague Alan Lepofsky likes to say, without aiming our new digital technologies and cultures purposefully, there is little point.

Key Aspect of the Future of Work: Online Communities Aimed at Shared Purpose

Particularly significant in the report was this year’s exploration on the oft-discussed and little resolved issues of calculating hard return-on-investment (ROI) for community. While in my experience online community is a far superior — albeit still emerging — new way of working for a wide variety of use cases than traditional methods, both internal and externally facing, The Community Roundtable tackled the issue head on in this year’s report to determine ROI from this year’s participants in the survey:

While there is a wide range and many communities do have negative ROI rates that are likely due to their young age, small size or immaturity, many more demonstrate compelling returns that should satisfy stakeholders.

Successful internal communities are more valuable, on average, than their external facing peers and those community programs that addressed both audiences had an ROI in the middle. Overall, communities average an annual ROI of 942% – suggesting that most community managers have nothing to fear from calculating their community’s ROI – remembering that it is the start of an ongoing dialog about value and how to grow it.

The numbers overall are impressive, and shows what I’ve seen consistently: The return on community is not only enough to justify the initial investment and is superior to most competing methods, but is also more than enough to properly fund the ongoing effort with a properly sized team. This especially means dedicated, professional community managers, which are perhaps the top success factor for communities, yet too often neglected in my experience. In short, we can now quantify how online communities and enterprise social networks offer significant value to the typical business. In any case, the numbers make the case on their own:

The ROI of Online Community by Use Case

From here we can see from the data, which Rachael Happe indicated to me recently in a discussion was from their largest sample size yet, is there is serious, immediate, and significant value in both internal and external communities. This continues to validate why online community should be a central plank of your digital strategy, and a core component of your digital transformation efforts.

Also, it’s worth noting that online community is also a key platform for enabling digital transformation, a key topic that came up last week in Paris by many practitioners at the Enterprise Digital SUMMIT, where I was speaking. I’ll explore that issue in more depth as well soon.

The value of social in the back office

The second report is “How social tools can reshape the organization” from the McKinsey Global Institute. Authored by well-known McKinsey partner Michael Chui — whom I finally got to meet recently in New Orleans at the Enterprise150 event — and several co-authors, the report delves into some recent findings on business impact with community and social tools that is worth exploring.

Social Tools and Community Enable Digitization and Performance

Particularly notable was the report’s finding that for any business activity which has been digitized, on average half report that incorporating social improves the digitized process even more, whatever the process. What’s more, specific business activities show a much higher level of improvement if they are digitized and made social, both (see chart above.) These activities include order-to-cash, demand planning, research & development (R&D), supply chain management, and procurement. These aren’t necessary glamorous aspects of our business, like marketing or sales, which are more often associated with social business performance but they are vital and important:

To digitize all processes, both internal and external, the results suggest that social tools can help. For every process where their companies are digitizing and using social tools, respondents agree that social technologies have enabled their use of digital overall. This is true even for the back-office processes where few respondents now say their companies are using social tools. In fact, social’s effect on digitization is greatest for the internal processes where social tools and digital activities are least common.

This data clearly shows that many efforts could be seeking higher levels of easily accessed value in places other than where we’ve traditionally focused. This also means that if you’re already digitizing something, it makes sense to make it social too.

Additional Reading: Enterprises need a (social) platform to drive change

In short, the case of online community is now stronger than ever: More data is available than ever before which shows substantial, sustained, and transformative value can be created by working in more open and highly participative models, as long as we’re sure to connect our activities to purpose. One of the things that struck me most in Paris last week is how many use cases that the latest case studies cite, far beyond simple knowledge sharing and management that used to be the central business case. It’s very encouraging to see our industry reach a new level of maturity and data-based value, though to be sure, there is still much more to do in most organizations.

Filed under Analysis, Online Community, Peer Production, Social Business, Social Collaboration, Strategy, The Enterprise

Restructuring the C-Suite for Digital Business: The Future of the CMO, CCO, CIO, and CDO

April 24, 2016 2 Comments

I’ve noticed lately what appears to be an emerging trend in marketing and communications leadership in some large companies. Specifically, the positions of chief marketing officer (CMO) and chief communications officer (CCO) are sometimes being consolidated into a single role, even in very large enterprises. Such consolidation has already happened at PG&E, Walgreens, and Citi, and I’ve recently encountered other notable instances as well. This might seem odd at first glance, as specialization of roles is usually emphasized in large entities as expansive purviews tend to be harder to manage.

It actually turns out, for several key reasons, that examining this closer is an interesting — and both useful and practical — thought exercise in how the single vast continuum of digital is putting growing pressure on the traditionally separated functional silos that have comprised most of our organizations for over a century.

This trend, and another like it I’ll propose we’ll see soon, is actually an apparent reversal of what organizations have been doing lately to better organize for technology, which is moving to the very center of how our organization operate and create value. In fact, the proliferation of C-level stakeholders for the rapidly expanding world of digital business has continued unabated in recent years, as chief data officers, digital officers, community officers, experience officers, analytics officers, and other similar C-level tech roles emerge and grow rapidly.

The Consolidation of the CMO and CCO for Digital Transformation

Too many cooks in the kitchen, some might say, but I pointed out last week on ZDNet that digital disruption — a wildly overused yet still quite apt phrase of our times — is now anticipated by most executives within the current planning cycle. The counter argument that is made for proliferation is that we need a lot more leadership on deck to more rapidly adapt our organizations to digital and head off disruption. The imperative is that we now have to a) think more like venture firms and startups, in other words our digital efforts have to move out of the quarter earnings cycle and become long term, while shifting to experimenting and failing fast until finding what works and b) our organizations require digital change capacity that is matched to today’s exponential cycle of technology evolution. Without both, we can’t maintain a sustainable pace matched to the market or reach a successful future state quickly enough.

In fact, what’s often hampering us in fact functional silos, both in our org structures and in our technology. We saw this very painfully with social media and social business a few years ago, and now we are witnessing it writ large as our customer experiences, the vital journey of which is the very lifeblood of our organizations, becomes ever more fragmented and divided across digital channels and our organizations’ operational silos. Customers get thrown over the wall to disorganized and inconsistent experiences as their journey takes them through our marketing departments, sales teams, customer service staff, and product development groups. Increasingly, our attempts to engage with companies as a customer is just ignored as we use new digital touchpoints that is obviously so much better — to us, but still unfamiliar to companies. In short, as organizations, we don’t have the capacity to be everywhere we are expected to be in the customer journey, and as organized today, don’t have a way to get there.

So how does the convergence of top-level roles in communications and engagement solve this problem? By removing a key silo while also adding the responsibility for both internal and external comms. Internal comms in particular is a critical addition, and is a key part of what a corporate communication officers oversee, as they are often the sponsor for the corporate ESN and intranet, essential platforms for organizing change at scale. As gaining holistic and integrated oversight and control of experience management — across customers, business partners, and employees — has become paramount, this merging of roles gives us a way to prevent it from fragmenting across projects, initiatives, technologies, tools, and digital channels. No more dividing internal and external engagement, giving us less inconsistent messaging and responses. In return, we can achieve better internal scale, more unified platforms, policies, and governance. We have one role for primary engagement.

One Likely Outcome of Digital Transformation: A Refactoring of the C-Suite

In other words, with CMO and CCO consolidation, we will have a single top-level org structure that is substantially better suited to oversee engagement across the single continuum of digital. We used to think that digital/social centers of excellence were required to bring together a consistent response to technology. This may be a better answer.

We will see how this trend plays out — and there are still open questions about where secondary engagement such as customer care and product development fit in — so I have begun tracking the industry data in LinkedIn to see if we can confirm a real trend based on my and others anecdotal experience. But from an critical thinking standpoint it makes sense why organizations are doing this.

The Fall of the Chief Digital Officer Too?

Which brings to my second trend, which is that we’ll likely see the same consolidation of function happen with the chief information officer (CIO) and the chief digital officer (CDO). I was initially bullish on the CDO a few years back — and still think they have an important combined innovation and P&L role to play, but as some like Theo Priestley have observed, the role is already under pressure and it’s time is likely to come to an end, at least as a top-level role. It will still exist of course but in this consolidation, would appear under the CIO purview. It now seems likely that many CIOs will merge CDO functions back in for all the same arguments that the CMO and CCO purviews should be combined.

Following this argument, removing silos in our organizations so that we can remove them from our digital products and experiences makes sense on its face. It can eliminate friction, make it possible to scale better, reduce poor execution, and create more shared value. I should point out however, it’s only part of the story for organizing better for digital. While other related topics like the bi-modal/multi-modal conversation seems to have hit a fever pitch, with McKinsey even joining the bandwagon, I think it’s vital that we also carefully consider simpler “digital hacks” to our organization that should be far easy to implement, but would in practice have significant impact.

Consequently, the consolidation of top digital roles into a chief marketing and communications officer (CMCO) and chief information and digital officer is — I now believe — a practical response to the proliferation of C-level digital roles to create the consistency, coherency, and effectiveness we need to change. However, this centralization will be an improvement as long as — and only as — such consolidation is properly balanced by bottom up and grassroots digital change programs, like a network of excellence powered by decentralized change agents, or a formally supported Shadow IT and marketing technology program. Without realizing both C-level role consolidation and networks of change together, sufficient digital scale and capacity will simply not exist for converged leadership to cultivate and guide.

Additional Reading

How Should Organizations Actually Go About Digital Transformation?

The digital transformation conversation shifts to how | ZDNet

Filed under Analysis, Digital Experience, Social Business, Strategy, The Enterprise, Trends and Statistics

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