How do we get there from here?
There are many things Digital Leaders & Role Models can do to accelerate progress towards a real digital workplace, and they all help improve our current ways of working at the same time.
Strategy:
Create a digital leadership group to coordinate digital strategy among all groups who have a stake in digital; encourage them to work together as a group using digital tools; publish the strategy and roadmap, and the story of where they think the organisation is headed.
Recruit a network of voluntary digital guides who want to see more rapid change; give them the tools and mandate to spread new ways of working, consult them regularly and promote them as exemplars of the change we want to see.
Consult every team about how they define their service offering and begin looking for potential to automate, orchestrate and modularise these services.
Skills:
Set the bar higher for basic digital skills and fluency; test for this in hiring; encourage employees to take responsibility for their own personal development and make clear that those who do will be rewarded with better opportunities; make available a greater variety of self-directed learning services to help people accelerate their development.
Initiate leadership development programmes for digital skills and new ways of working along similar lines; communicate clearly that anybody who feels they are too important to get involved in digital development will be left behind; visibly over-invest in emerging digital leaders and fast track them into organisational leadership.
Technology:
Use your digital workplace to organise a conversation with the whole organisation on what needs to change and how.
Create a digital learning community that is connected to your main digital workplace hub; encourage peer-to-peer sharing of use cases, tips, tool advice, examples of good practice, etc.; encourage the digital guides to curate and develop these learning resources.
Create and share a map of the key digital services and capabilities that will form the basis for the organisation’s future platform, and begin to design and develop the architecture that connects them.