Social Business and The Digital Workplace

For those of you who follow my blog but don't know I also write for CMS Wire, or for some reason have missed out on some of the articles, here are my most recent ones:

The Six Pillars of Social Business

"For any organization that has the ambition to survive in the long haul, it needs to look beyond the quarter economics and invest aggressively in initiatives aiming to improve collaboration and organizational agility, including establishing a culture and practices that continuously improve collaboration, knowledge sharing and communication across the extended enterprise. It has to build it’s future on the six pillars of Social Business."

Social Business: We Have the Tools. Now What?

"The reasons may vary, but the fact that social tools have been bundled with information management platforms such as SharePoint mostly likely has made the decision to introduce them fairly easy. It is almost as if this has taken both corporate decision-makers as well as the early adopters by surprise. Now that we all have the tools, what shall we do with them? How can we use them to change the way we work? And even if we see the use cases and want to change our ways of working, how do our work environments encourage and enable us to do this?"

Six Core Digital Workplace Capabilities: Designing with the Workforce in Mind

"The failure of the technology-centric approach to improving knowledge work is a major reason why new concepts such as “Digital Workplace” have a reason for existence. The Digital Workplace encourages us to take a more holistic approach when designing the digital work environment for an organization’s workforce. Rather than focusing on the individual solutions and tools such as intranet sites, collaboration tools, communication tools and productivity tools, we need to start with identifying the needs of the organization and its people and take a holistic approach to designing their digital workplace."

The Digital Workplace: The Need for Good Practices in a Complex Work Environment

"Today's workforce has a growing number of tools at their disposal to communicate, collaborate and get work done. But there is a concurrent increase in workflow complexity, which, left unmanaged, results in time lost and inefficiencies. It's time to bridge the gap between the two. For easily repeatable tasks, the process has often been defined and implemented in the systems you are using, such as an ERP system. In knowledge-intense and highly dynamic and collaborative work environments, processes are often barely repeatable (check out Thingamy for more on the concept of barely repeatable processes). This means that knowledge workers who participate in a task have to design or redesign the process each time it is executed. Much more is required from those who participate in a barely repeatable process than an easily repeatable. Instead of simply following instructions created by a process engineer, you have to be a process engineer yourself and design the process on the fly as you execute it."