Old habits die hard ...
... or what to consider on your journey to the Digital Workplace like Office 365
Moving to a platform like Office 365 is top priority on the agenda of most companies that I have had the pleasure dealing with. Even the most conservative players are now moving towards the ecosystem providers like Microsoft or Amazon.
Today's business demands to be able to react quickly to customer needs and trends as well as to new regulations in regards of risk management, customer protection or tax transparency.
Super complex is super out, so you need platforms to consolidate your architecture (to) and be sure to utilize your data in the most efficient way to meet these future demands quickly and be ahead of the competition.
Introducing a platform like Office 365 is different to the on-premise projects and there is a lot that can go wrong if not planned for in the early stages of the project.
So what are the main topics you need to cover to make your cloud project a success ?
Management buy-in
The first thing you need on your journey to the digital workplace is senior management buy-in. This may prove much more difficult than you think and here is why with the example of E-Mail:
For the past 20+ years people are using the E-Mail client for everything and they got very good at it. They use it as their personal file system, their Knowledge database with complex folder structures, they define rules for executing small workflows and they have all data in an e-mail archive covering at least the past 10 years. E-mail is the most important and sometimes the only tool for them.
Discussing a topic via e-Mail for instance is a typical over-usage of your e-mail system. Although modern e-mail clients provide conversation threads that groups together certain mails, it is useless compared to the conversation facility of a Microsoft Teams or Yammer client for example where you can do much more (like, share, rate) than just answering the question. Not only does everybody has the better overview which leads to a more efficient conversation, but you also reduce e-mail volume.
The modern challenges that we are facing today demand a very effective collaboration based on a digital workplace to be able to solve the problems or entire projects faster than the competition. You still need E-Mail but it has reached its pinnacle long time ago and will not help you on your quest for a more efficient collaboration for your workforce.
So what has all that to do with management buy-in ?
Top management usually is exactly this category of E-Mail user that was described before. They have mastered E-Mail usage and they also have assistants who help them with short term requirements and a lot of communication. E-Mail, for this group of users, is practically instant messaging as nobody dares to ignore a request and answers in a very timely fashion. Liking, rating and especially adding emoticons is not seen as business related.
This means it might not be enough to simply present technical advantages and facts why you need to introduce a digital workplace tool like MS Teams. You can explain the advantages but to really win them over you need to make them use the tool to fully grasp its potential. None of the single functions that Office 365 offers is a head turner for them – but the user experience being in a seamless integrated collaboration ecosystem is. This is difficult to cover on a slide for a presentation, so you have to use it to experience the effects.
My recommendation is: Sit with the assistant and find a business case where top management (or part of it) can make good use of the tool, then start with a small pilot and take it from there.
Any pilot that involves top management will be beneficial to secure management buy-in. It is essential !
Standardization
The most important thing is out-of-the-box standardization. You can easily cover around 80% of business requirements using out-of the-box functionality. Don’t go crazy customize your Software as a Service (cloud) environment just because it is possible. Especially if you are coming from the old on-Premise world and are used to modify everything – just don’t !
The SaaS provider will change existing functions and design, add new software and much more regularly. This means your customized code or design is in jeopardy all the time. Trust me, you don’t want to go down that route.
The old habits and methods of fully controlling and configuring your workplace software at your convenience are not working any more with the cloud.
A small percentage of around 15%-20% are those requests that cannot be done out-of-the-box. This usually is where processes are refined to the special needs of the company and markets. Often this represents the edge over the competition.
Try to find or code lean applications for the business requirements that are system independent but integrate at the same time using the cloud APIs (interfaces). Statements that you may hear saying “we do not need developers in the future anymore because the user can do it himself in the new environment or there is always a free app available....” are wrong and misleading for complex business environments.
Tools will become more and more customer friendly and easier to use for the business. Nevertheless, for the foreseeable future, you will always have some kind of IT developer/architect/analyst taking care of the design of the process in the IT environment instead of the business person himself.
To use free apps, which are available everywhere, for these individual business processes can turn out to be fre(e)akish expensive once you have implemented the business requirements, embedded it into your corporate environment and need to pay for a 3rd party to develop and support it going forward.
Depending on the size of your organization and given resources, developing internal solutions may come cheaper considering the full lifecycle of an individual application.
To sum it up: use out-of-the-box functionality for your SaaS Workplace and create a reusable environment for your individual solutions to support the business processes.
Reduce Complexity and Shadow-IT
This is a passionate topic of mine and a seriously important one because it has a direct impact on the acceptance of the new workplace and on security going forward.
Introducing a new cloud-based workplace like Office 365 means introducing a variety of tools to the end-user. To do it right also requires switching off the old tools and this is where things go wrong in many projects. Due to high user-resistance and effort shutting legacy software down, a lot of old tools simply stay alive. The user then decides which tool he feels more comfortable with and that will be the old solution in most cases, no matter what the official recommendation may be.
Especially data must be stored in the cloud solution to be able to effectively collaborate. If users are still managing their data locally or in network drives a vast majority of the advantages within a cloud solution is lost.
With a setup that just adds new tools you will be getting complaints very soon about a much too complex environment where nobody knows what tool to use when.
High discipline is required to not only plan for the introduction of the new world but at the same time also shutting down the old world. This is time consuming. If the product responsibility for the old and the new products and tools do not lie in one hand, which is the case in many companies, then the CIO must make sure decisions are made and then followed. Shutting down infrastructure has political implications and the CIO needs to be on top of it.
Security is the other topic I want to bring up in this context. But rather than speaking about all kind of cyber-attacks which is already well covered, I would like to focus your attention on shadow-IT.
The services of the IT department are in high demand and IT usually is not not able to cater for all the application requests coming from the business units, especially not for those on short notice. As a result, business will go out and officially buy a(nother) 3rd party application or unofficially use applications that are available for free everywhere in the cloud.
Either way you will end up with a lot of different applications making matters more complex. Not even to mention the fact that you have no control over data residing outside your company IT environment. Imagine employees leaving to a competitor with their own free cloud account full of data accrued over years.
The introduction of the fast-evolving cloud solutions like Office 365 gives you the chance to satisfy demand quick enough and make sure people are using the company environment instead of other 3rd party solutions. With all the data privacy and intellectual property regulations this is an often-overlooked security topic.
The challenge is to ensure every individual understands and embraces the functionality of the new cloud workplace. Which leads us straight to the next important point – how to train for the cloud.
User Training
First thing is first, so from the beginning please make sure you don’t leave it to the IT department to solve this topic on their own. This challenge needs to be tackled by corporate communication, HR and IT together to achieve the best results.
Training the user for the new digital environment with continuous fast paced changes in a timely fashion is a big challenge.
In the old world you produced a nice colorful paper-flyer with a comprehensive overview, gave it to the user and the instructions and screenshots were valid for as long as the internal IT department decided to run the version of the software.
Today, with external vendors like Microsoft controlling your environment, a document like that would be lasting a couple of weeks before it is outdated - if you are lucky. Any type of static training content is not only a nightmare for IT keeping it up to date but also a point of frustration for the user due to its inaccuracy.
A new approach to spread knowledge must be taken and that means operating multiple channels and preparing the user for a continuously changing environment.
The key is to leverage the knowledge which is already there. You would be surprised how many people in your organization have excellent knowledge about existing tools and hardly anybody is aware of that. Make use of that knowledge and start a community focusing on a few key topics.
You will find that the end-users time in the communities is well spend. Of course, you have to moderate the community but it can be done by an apprentice from any department with very little supervision.
Prioritize the topics and conduct regular short (30 min.) webinars with your subject matter experts. Give some time for Q&A at the end. This way the attention span of the audience is not strained too much. You can easily adjust the frequency of the webinars over time to the demand of the users.
Find the product champions within your business organization and make sure you give them extra attention. Not only will they spread their knowledge but also impact others with their positive can-do attitude.
It is of course very important that all training related information can be found in one single spot which is easy to find and to access for everybody.
While the old-fashioned methods in a fast-changed environment do not scale up to suit larger organizations, there is an exception to that rule.
Especially in the beginning phase you have to make sure that managers who want to use the cloud tools for their department and projects are getting time from your consultants. The managers need to understand how these tools can add value for them. This is important because it will require changing the workstyle of the business units.
It seems so simple, yet in any organization this really is a big challenge and requires preparation, dedication and continuously evolving with the cloud.
Get all these points right and you are in for a serious digital transformation of your business.
Take-away points:
- Management buy-in is not only based on facts
- Standardize out-of-the-box workplace for at least 80% of business cases, cater for individualized solutions and keep them lean
- Reduce complexity - Shut down old tools, deploy the digital workplace solutions and reduce Shadow-IT
- New way of User Training and knowledge transfer has to be found