Change in the Digital Workplace [FAQ]

What if change is not part of your strategy?

That means you’re depending on the world being the same in one, two, five, or ten years. If you look back over five, two, or even one month, you can tell the world has been changing at an accelerated pace.

You need to be ready to adapt in ways you have never considered before. That will take some imaginative new approaches to technology, implemented in the most strategic positions of your sales and operations.

What happens if you don’t pursue new technology?

Then you will gradually lose touch with what “new technology” even means. Ten years ago, our impression of new technology was the rise of the smartphone.

Today, new technology takes the mobile world completely for granted. The cutting edge of innovation around machine learning, analytics and edge computing is built on top of that advancement – and many others – as a deep foundation.

The more you put off your homework around tech, the older your sensibilities will feel when you do peek your head out to see what the world has been working on lately.

What is a digital workplace task force, and what happens if you don’t make it a priority to develop one?

A digital workplace task force is, simply, a team who is responsible for evangelizing the adoption of technology that drives results for your enterprise. This can be a Digital Services department, providing process improvement via revamped applications.

It can be an IT department that embraces cost-cutting measures and proactively enables the infrastructure to give your teammates access to better, job-relevant analytics. It can be a completely new business unit, tasked with being an innovation center of excellence that creates new customer-facing digital services and products using only your deep industry experience and all the data you can get your hands on.

Any of these task forces can drive digital change back into your operations and your bottom line. If you don’t make it an organizational priority to create such units, then you are leaving the opportunities of new technology on the table.

What happens if you don’t connect the dots between technology and culture?

Then you’ll be stuck with legacy applications, legacy infrastructure – and legacy workforce habits. What drives our day-to-day experience of our work more than the people, ideas, and software that we are constantly exposed to? These routines – these habits of mind and tendencies to either solve or accept life’s problems – define our workplace culture.

Technology has seismic power to drive change in our workplace culture, and conversely, no brilliant mobile app or analytics tool will find use in the hands of people who see such advances as a mere nuisance. If new technology can touch a nerve of innovation and activate your team’s desire to drive their careers with real change, then you don’t have to worry about overlooking the potential in either your people or your digital operations.

What happens if you don’t use all your available data to review and improve your processes?

Then you have no benchmarks. You have no standards, no baselines, and no measurable expectations of your business processes. If you can’t measure the efficiency of each segment of your enterprise, you can’t reliably identify the bottlenecks that stop a quote from becoming a closed sale, or really understand why some desirable inventory piles up in your warehouses more than it should.

You grow your efficiency only when you smartly review the data your operations generate today. Even moreso, if you strategically digitize your processes (especially those around paperwork, email, and phone calls), you can generate even more process data to drive much greater insights. This is the “soft” day-to-day process information that suddenly becomes measurable, useful, and vital to accelerating your operations.