Digital workplace strategy priority #1: Re-define your IT department

Your company needs a digital workplace strategy more than it needs an IT department. In fact, your IT department might be what’s holding you back from your digital workplace strategy.

This doesn’t mean the end for the IT – just a radical, top-to-bottom re-think about how technology fits into a digital business.

It is said that every company is a digital company now, no matter what its line of business. In a survey of Fortune 500 CEOs last year, 67 per cent said they considered their organisation to be a technology company, regardless of the industry they operated in. That means creating digital products and services for customers, and yet many companies hobble the people doing the creating with with technology from a bygone era. The enterprise software that still dominates so many workplaces is holding back companies at a time when they need to be adapting to new marketplace realities.

Radically new ways of doing business require radically new ways of working. As digital technology disrupts businesses it simultaneously offers the tools to enable a truly digital workplace.

Emma Cooper, Organisational Change Lead for the UK and Ireland at Accenture said: “Flexible working needs to be combined with new, innovative technologies because you can’t adopt flexible or collaborative working without the relevant technology to support and underpin it.”

Resistance is futile

The fact is, employees are working digitally already — or trying damn hard to — even when their organisation isn’t. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has shifted to Bring Your Own Software (BYOS). And this can be bad news for the unprepared organisation. Exactly what software is being used? How secure is it? How can it possibly work within existing security and compliance policies?

It’s no closing our eyes and hoping everyone will revert back to the corporate standard. And draconian edicts forbidding new tools will go down very badly indeed with the most talented employees who are only using instinct and initiative to do their jobs better. Attracting the best talent these days is as much about modern, flexible ways of working as it is about salary and benefits.

BYOS is the natural work-around for workers who are limited and frustrated by the range of clunky, out-dated enterprise software systems they are expected to use every day. Companies, says BCG, have spent a lot of money integrating their systems with each other but not with the way people work. The result has been that “technology that was meant to liberate employees has insidiously trapped them. It is no wonder that, in 2014 in the US, 51% of employees reported being disengaged, while 18% said they were ‘actively disengaged’”.

In every other aspect of these employees’ lives, technology brings ease, speed and convenience. Their devices and apps are how they get things done and it is a given that such technology should be simple, intuitive and even enjoyable to use. It seems crazy that workplace technology has been allowed to fall so catastrophically behind.

Employees as consumers

In its eight ‘building blocks’ for enabling a digital workplace, Gartner includes the necessity for digital information to be ‘on-demand and on target’. It says: “Workers expect their enterprise tools to mimic the sources and applications they use every day — from Google Now to Apple Siri — data must be accessible and useful.”

It goes on to call out three consumer information trends: Enterprise file-sharing systems with mobile access and effortless synchronisation; search focusing on places where workers truly keep or seek information; and personal analytics dashboards for employees to track their progress.

For ‘trends’ don’t read ‘trendy’. The digital workplace isn’t just some fad, an optionally preferable way of working. It is increasingly vital to remain innovative and competitive. As a deloitte report puts it: “As the workplace continues to evolve, and employee expectations shift, organisations that do not embrace the digital workplace risk falling behind.”

What a digital workplace enables is the greater organisational agility Man + Machine explored in an earlier post.

This is about de-centralised working, moving to a 'Team of Teams', integrating outside contractors and freelancers more seamlessly into teams rather than treating them as second class citizens. Customers, and even competitors, become part of the wider conversation. It’s about enabling innovation and speed to market in the face of competition from agile start-ups.

The end of IT as we know it?

All of this means a profound change for how the IT function operates within an enterprise. First, let’s be clear that organisations need expert technology specialists more than ever. But in a fast-moving, product centric, agile company it makes little sense to have that expertise and talent locked inside a departmental silo that bears little resemblance to the way the rest of the business — and wider world — works.

Digital expertise, then, needs to be embedded at the team level so it can help this process but in a way that benefits everyone while maintaining control over systems and data.

So we need to keep the IT, but confine idea of a dedicated department to the history books. Technology must permeate through every vein of the organisation, free of all but the barest constraints. And digital technologists must be liberated from the shackles of the basement to rage a truly transcendent Digital Revolution. Companies that fail to take this literally will become the fodder of business school case studies for generations to come.

This all starts with adopting a Digital Workplace, embracing the diversity of a modern enterprise rather than fighting it.

Blink is a unified interface for work that puts everything you need within easy reach. It integrates with enterprise systems to allow you to access the data you need from within this unified workspace, including unified search to find anything from one search bar, no matter which application it lives in. We even have a single feed that puts all your important updates and pending approvals in one place.

So Blink enables the digital workplace, and we free everyone to achieve more.