The new IT mindset as espoused by the marvelous Dion Hinchcliffe in
A CIO’s guide to the future of work| ZDNet | Hinchcliffe | Oct 2014
requires four things:
- Co design
- Engagement
- Multi channel device support
- Emergence
Co design
“Conversations and business processes should be open and participative by default. Digital communities must be developed and cultivated around communities of practice and key stakeholders, especially including customers”
“...maintaining a clear path using a consistent set of visual cues becomes ever more important, to answer worker -- and other stakeholder -- questions about whether they're using official systems or not.”
Engagement
Hinchcliffe mentioned a few thing on this point, identify gaps, address them through continous improvement. Spend more time building staff awareness and capability and less on implementation.
This is where a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) or Digital Engagement expert and their team come in and where I can help. Resourcing of adoption is nearly always an organisational blind spot. Has it ever happen to you. You come into to work and a new system, device, etc. has been installed to replace the old one with very little support in place. Maybe there is a war room team to help out with hiccups, but often if a larger scale communication, training, and adoption plan was in place you would cease to have a problem.
“self-service search and analytic tools combined with an much more open, integrated information landscape is the key to creating business value, as workers can help themselves to what they need for their knowledge work, rather than having to work through IT to provide tools, design queries, and otherwise do what every worker should be able to do for themselves.”
Clear and transparent reporting so knowledge workers can help themselves to what they need is best. They will most likely need to get trained up by a Digital Officer first so they understand what data and analytics to measure and how to interpret them.
Multichannel/Device support
You know what I see here design... taking the time to craft and consider how a service is designed is becoming the lynchpin of successful digital strategy.
“The fundamental issue at hand seems to be whether a centralized technology enablement function (the IT department) invented for another, simpler age can service the full range of complex and specialized needs across countless departments and divisions, while still keeping up with the blistering pace of digital progress, all of which are on Internet-time…
...the need for a consistent and ubiquitous corporate information landscape that's easy to access and easy to use, so that workers can find accurate, timely information, analyze it, and share the results. While yesterday's IT could be somewhat siloed, today's modern enterprise must have an open architectures, from data to APIs, to search and discovery, that makes it possible for the knowledge that flows within the organization to find its way to wherever it needs to be, and to do it all securely as well.”
Emergence
Focusing on service design, understanding how the network age means that knowledge and work is enabled by access, and ability to share and collaborate will become increasingly crucial for efficient delivery of digital services. Developing liquid networks, measuring the right data, and giving your organisation the ability to react quickly and autonomously will help you achieve you business objective in this competitive age.