The Digital Gap
Today it's easy to manage our household from the smartphone, the car or the tablet in the living room. A great deal of our lives has become digital and every kid is used to managing things one-handed.
On the contrary, at work most of us are still forced to "boot up a pc" to achieve the simplest tasks. In an accelerated digital world many organizations are hopelessly lagging behind when it comes to providing a state of the art digital experience for their workforce.
Before the pandemic we secretly tried to get stuff done from home - just because the internet was so much faster or our kids’ gaming PC had the computing power we’d never get from our company laptop. During the pandemic, working from home became mandatory and the new normal. Everything was tolerated (at least unofficially) to get the job done and finally help the company to survive. Previous concerns were suddenly blown away. IT-compliance and data-governance policies got adapted quickly to the pandemic situation and became less rigid.
It already became obvious for management teams that IT organizations can only provide some solutions and building blocks in a complex, fast changing world. Subsequently, employees have been encouraged to fill the gaps all by themselves.
From Digital Citizen to Citizen Developer
People took the chance to use any tools which were available to get the job done. Overnight they developed from Digital Citizens to Citizen Developers. They have managed to set up their home-office equipment and acquire diverse digital skills all by themselves. Many solutions have been created as temporary workarounds for the crisis. As a result, people got a little closer to the digital experience they expect in day-to-day business.
Now, as the pandemic seems to be over, we all realize that there is no simple way "back". Lifestyles and workstyles have changed, and new challenges are emerging: disrupted supply chains, price increases, energy shortages and more.
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The risk of reverting into pre-pandemic habits
Some organizations sell their return-to-office calls with a keep-your-workstyle slogan. However, new ways of working demand new approaches and tools too. What's the benefit of working from the office if it doesn't support our new ways of working better than working from home? If return-to-office means reverting into the old ways of working, it's easy to understand why many employees prefer to stay in crisis mode or consider changing jobs.
The gap between a digital everyday life experience and the digital work experience became too big and organizations need to decide carefully which route to take in a post-pandemic scenario - which might be a pre-pandemic scenario again as well.
If you only have a hammer everything looks like a nail
Limited by the digital tools offered at work, people have become astonishingly creative. Everyone's first impulse is to create a spreadsheet and share it with the team. Together they define how to maintain the spreadsheet’s data. In a couple of weeks, a complex business process has evolved, and the spreadsheet’s complexity continues to grow daily. The point where everyone wishes they hadn’t underestimated the complexity and maintenance effort needed comes sooner or later.
In a post-pandemic world, organizations need to provide more ways of creating digital solutions. The existing set of tools provided by organizational IT won’t close the digital gap. The digital gap will be closed by those employees who fearlessly use whatever tool, App or platform fits the purpose and helps them to create digital solutions to get the daily tasks done efficiently.
This could also be a fantastic reason to return to the office. People can digitally transform the way of working together onsite, share with others over a coffee how they are mastering the new digital era and learn how others do.
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Personal note: There’s a platform I am working on. A lot of my passion and dedication goes into this. It’s called Atrigam. If you’re curious how Atrigam can help closing the digital gap, feel free to book a 15 minutes Atrigam introduction slot with my Co-Founder and CEO Andreas. Register now in just 10 seconds https://atrigam.com/intro/
Writer | Developmental Editor
2 年This is brilliant. The shift has been slow. Thirty years ago, hardly anyone used computers for personal tasks. Now we all do. In the personal sphere, technology has changed our workflows. In the business sphere, in many cases, technology merely accelerates old business processes. You're right. When people say we're more productive at home, this is part of it. It's not just the distractions in the office or the ability to run errands or better sleep. What many people discovered over the past two years was that the adjustments made for remote work made the work processes themselves more efficient--and more like the easy consumer processes we're all used to, like banking, ordering food, using Facebook rather than email/phone to invite people to events, etc., etc., etc.
Software Development Contractor
2 年1. Donald Knuth (Seminumerical Algorithms) once observed that about 1 in 20 people are able to program. Given the global population of 8 billion, of which 4 billion are of working age and presumably working, this estimate would suggest 200 million would be the most that could be expected to actually produce useful programming. Due to various exclusions, such as gender or tribal disenfranchisements, the actual population that is both mentally capable and educated is probably limited to about 50 million. Those with access to smart phones may be able to prevail even 'against the odds'. This number could be conservative.
Software Development Contractor
2 年2. However, those that are good at programming might also be good doctors, generals, accountants, or other roles that compete with software development. Therefore, while more than 50 million might actually be enabled, it's also possible that some of those that would do this are otherwise engaged. It is fairly easy to communicate the idea of the transistor as an amplifier. A 12 volt base potential is modulated by a millivolt waveform to generate a much larger equivalent waveform that ranges from 0 to 12 volts. A few transistors can be organized into a radio circuit for listening to music.
Software Development Contractor
2 年3. Explaining computers, however, zooms out in layer after layer of complexity. A NAND gate is made up of 6 transistors, an XOR gate is made up of 6 transistors, the two of them together make up a single bit slice of a circuit for adding two numbers together. A row of these 8, 16, or 32 bits wide makes up a circuit for adding two values together and leaving the results in an accumulator. The addition circuit is one of several, another of which performs subtraction and comparison, another of which provides bitwise AND functionality, and so forth. These are all integrated into an arithmetic/logic unit (ALU). The ALU receives and stores data into registers and memory. At this point the number of transistors involved is in the tens of thousands if not millions or billions.
Software Development Contractor
2 年4. The people that gravitate to this are fascinated with complexity. Such people are also likely to be interested in model railroads - very complex assemblages with a lot of moving parts; ships; or science fiction scenarios that envisage a 'clash of empires'. Such people are vacuuming up information right and left, and tend to be socially distant as their brains are preoccupied with organizing whatever they are learning. While white collar workers stuck at home with their customer relationship management and financial services roles have some capacity to 'automate' their work processes, these are likely to be 'linear' - things like Excel macros. They will not necessarily involve complex conditional expressions, looping structures, any kind of data schema, or anything involving 'markup' (HTML or anything with 'styles': fonts, font sizes, background colors, text justification, etc.).