Provoke: Digital Workplace Transformation Trends

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I’ll demonstrate how intranets have changed and how they are no longer fit for purpose in most organisations. Then I’ll spend the bulk of my time exploring key trends. And finally, I’ll look at some practical steps that you can take within your organisations to make use of this in a world of disruption.
This whole briefing is titled: The intranet is dead…

Now here’s a quote from… no-one ever. “The intranet just works! It’s pretty much what gets me up in the morning, and I love it.” Now, I get that it’s easy to have a poke at Intranets. They are an easy target. They don’t get the love and attention that customer-facing systems get. But Intranets do an important job, right? Well, increasingly we’re finding that the way organisations think about intranets and the way they run them is actually harming their businesses, and preventing them from undergoing the digital workplace transformation that they need in order to be successful in a world of ongoing disruption. And we believe that the time is right to challenge the place Intranets have at the digital heart of companies.

For most organisations, the intranet is a bit like this. It started out with the promise of vibrancy and life. But after a while the world changed. We tried to breathe new life into it. We sew it together, bolt on new pieces, and give it upgrades… hoping that the seams wouldn’t tear too badly under the strain.
But the reality is that we’ve created a monster. At best it’s cobbled together and limps along. At worst it’s a frightening mess and people avoid it at all costs.
What went wrong?

If we roll back a few years, Intranets we’re simpler. They were mainly for corporate communication, some collaboration and project spaces, a directory and an information dumping ground we pretended was organised. People came to work, they used the Intranet (or not) on their laptops and they left. Simple!

So we bolted them together with integration effort and APIs.
And of course what we end up with is a mess, because we have complex integration, 3rd party tools hooking stuff together, product upgrade chaos, inconsistent experiences and so on… and it’s all being forced on to this system that was designed for something far simpler.
The benefits we hoped to realise just don’t materialise and we’re left exhausted with a massive system requiring lots of attention to keep it all from falling apart.

So what though? If it’s all a bit harder than we’d hoped. But it kind of works. You can navigate around stuff and you can use enterprise social tools? What’s the problem?

The problem is your business is vulnerable to disruption.
John Chambers, CEO of Cisco said this at the end of April this year, recognising that for organisations to succeed they need to shift from being companies that have bolted on digital, to being companies that are digital to the core.
If you’re not convinced that we’re in a time of disruption…

[Run through]
And it’s disruption fuelled by a perfect storm of three massive trends…

Those trends are:
The rise of millennials within the workplace – causing a huge amount of innovation and disruption to our normal models of operating a business
The explosion of connected devices of all shapes and sizes – creating new opportunities to unlock markets or create operational efficiencies
The impact of cloud services and ubiquitous connectivity – making possible things that only a few years ago would have seemed ridiculous

To unpack this, we’re going to look at the three drivers in turn. I’m sure you’ve talked heard talks about millennials before, so I’m not going to dwell on this one other than to stress that they are fundamentally different from previous generations. These are the digital natives, having grown up with internet and having at least a part of their teenage years with social media. This has affected how they think, operate, and work. Looking at some recent findings from Mary Meeker’s Internet trends 2015 report…

Strong but temporary relationship with devices they own
Don’t have a work/life balance. They have a single blurred state
Collaboration baked in at a cellular level (adopt tools to ensure they can do this regardless of what your enterprise policy is)
Me-centred expectations – personalisation, products, services, work all wrap around me
Study on millennials 87% say they have their smartphone with them day and night. Nearly 50% use personal devices for work, expect to work outside office hours, flexibly, and remotely, expect to be able to manage personal life from workplace, >40% personally pay for downloaded apps to help them work more effectively.

So millennials resent some big implications for those responsible for digital within the workplace, in terms of:
making things work across boundaries and across devices in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s hard or clunky
supporting tools that unlock ability to collaborate effectively – both inside and outside the organisation.
making their experience of working for you personal and engaging.

Make it personal – we’re all much more attuned to getting a personal tailored service now
Make the working experience transition across device boundaries and tools. We work without borders and so should our working environment
Find tools that work for your employees. If you force corporate systems onto millennials they will disengage, and you will lose the benefits they can bring (we know employee engagement  increased CSAT  profitability)
Accept inevitability of regular change of tooling. Millenials will continue to move on and don’t have the same inertia to technical systems that previous generations have  Not investment in massive systems, but willingness to adopt new tools rapidly

More on that later. Now let’s move on to device innovation, and how devices that give new insights into our digital world are transforming businesses. There are hundreds of examples here, but let’s look at two big ones… wearable technology, and the rise of cheap sensor technology.
QUESTION: Who here owns a smartwatch or smartband? Who here owns a tablet? Who owns a smartphone? Who 5 years ago owned a tablet? Who ten years ago owned a smartphone? Adoption waves  it’s coming and we need to be ready

When we think of wearables it’s typically smart glasses and smart-bands/watches. There are other wearables, including smart clothing –Ralph Lauren smart shirts measure heart rate, stress, breathing, distance, intensity of movement, and calories burned, and send that data to a user’s smartphone.
Smart watches, smart bands, and smart glasses are becoming more common in the workplace, both because employees are bringing them in and because employers are realising the benefits they can get from them too. In a recent survey, more than 2/3 businesses in the UK currently have employees with wearable technology, and nearly all (91%) expect that to rise over the coming few months. One driver for this is that employees and employers have seen benefits (In a month-long trial at a marketing firm, productivity jumped 8.5% and job satisfaction climbed 3.5%).
While mostly this is personal devices, the major interest area now is where businesses can find specific use cases. Examples of use are: contextual alerts (in warehousing or safety context), healthcare & health monitoring of employees, targeted messaging in customer-facing environments… Some are obviously very niche use (e.g. smart fabrics for firefighters that alert to heat stress, toxins etc…) but many others generic across retail, knowledge workers, … Where organisations have consciously pushed wearables, it’s typically been around healthcare and productivity. For example, BP have given workers in the US fitbits to help promote employee health and reward those that meet activity targets. Or in warehousing, where smartbands are used to help design more efficient design layouts based on employee movement data.

Two quick examples of workplace wearables…
APX Labs app allows field workers such as telecom service technicians or utility workers to quickly log a case while they continue to work.
Brivo Labs identity access management app works with the Nymi wristband or a smartwatch to control access of employees to both laptops and physical spaces. The app identifies the wearer by the unique rhythm of his or her pulse.

As a quick taster of what’s coming, our own Gary Pretty has had a trial of the Microsoft hololens. And while it’s initially aimed at gaming, it’s aspirations are clear for designers, architects, field workers and so on. I took this clip from the video which shows someone walking another person through the process of a plumbing task, with their video and the in-air instructions being overlaid in real-time. Sure it’s not ready yet but talk to Gary and he can give you a better idea of what they are investing in the next generation of wearables and related applications.

However, there is a blurring into big brother territory here. Kronos, who support the likes of Apple and Starbucks with workforce management software, are investing into wearable applications to look at things like monitoring employees for signs of stress. There’s a positive side to this for sure, but it begins to raise huge implications for privacy, complexity around data ownership (especially from employee wearables). Wearables also present additional challenges for security (and data-security), risk of identifty theft etc… WYOD policies are clearly needed to support BYOD.

OK, let’s move on to sensors. These are interesting to us in the context of running our digital workplaces because they can provide real-time data on assets. Crucially where this used to involve big expensive sensor equipment and costly proprietary systems to interpret results, we’re moving into a world where we can get sensors produced very cheaply, connect to it remotely, and aggregate data used common standards and tools.
To give a sense of how broad the potential of this stretches… River flood detection in Oxford (Arduino ultrasonic sensor). BAE spray on skin of sensors, each <1mm big measuring hull stress, temperature, magnetic field strength
Potential for business – safety, efficiency, remote monitoring. As they’re so cheap now they can be put on as disposable part of process. Question: What could you measure?

So if we take a step back, what we can see is a growing trend towards quantification of our experiences. We rate experiences, we calculate our performance, we add gamification to our health, we track our sleep patterns and so on… If it can be measured it can be improved. We’re firmly established in the era of the quantified self.
My own contribution – not fast but fast enough. 

But if we keep pulling back we can see that all this amazing sensor data that we have is also being put to use quantifying our world. We have river flow and water quality being tracked by static sensors, agricultural drones evaluating biomass with LIDAR, and low orbit satellites measuring changes at the macro scale, including movements of people during humanitarian disasters, and locust migrations.
We already have the quantified earth.

To this I’d like to add another level, where we focus in on an organisation and the wealth of data available to us, both through internet enabled devices and also the sum total of information our employees generate during their activities, everything from aggregated average health of our employees, patterns of collaboration and sensors across our organisations.
Amazon often come up in case studies – they use drones and robots and all sorts of cool stuff, but one thing I read a while ago that resonated is that Amazon have hooked their physical environment up to the performance of their online world. If revenue for a site drops below a certain threshold then this triggers real world alarms that then allows a response in real-time to adjust promotions and offers to get things back on track. So the challenge here again is what opportunities does the quantified enterprise present for management insight, efficiencies, and innovation?

OK, final key driver is cloud and connectivity. All the devices in the world wouldn’t drive disruption is they couldn’t connect to each other or take advantage of the computing power available through cloud services. Improvements happening all the time in network availability, speed and reduced cost.

Why is cloud important for disruption? It lowers the barrier to entry. If you can spin up systems that allow you to run all the administrative functions of your organisation and scale it as you do, then you can focus exclusively on what matters for success. The reduced risk also allows bigger players to be more experimental with new services. This week, for example, Apple announced it would be running its own radio station. So what else can happen if you bring cloud services into the mix…?

Well, one example of this that could not have happened without the combination of millennial-thinking and cloud services is that of SEO company Hit Reach, who have used cloud service IFTTT to fully automate manual tasks right from an online order. This handles our invoice generation, payment, email marketing list management, project management setup, auto-responder emails and shared client folder setup. It finishes up by sending a tweet from the Hit Reach Twitter account, and popping the kettle on for a nice cuppa.. All without any human intervention.

Finally just one of my favourite recent hacks is from someone putting a small light in the handle of his umbrella. A cloud service checks his outlook diary and the weather forecast for the locations he will be during the day, and if for any of those there is a chance of rain it flashes so he knows to pick it up on the way out the door.

So the scene is set for us to hack the enterprise. That’s worrying of course, because typically we like a slower pace of change in organisations. We have concerns over security, and resilience. We employ cautious IT people for a reason! All this is valid, but disruption doesn’t wait around and we need to find ways to help our organisations adapt and survive. We know our employees are our greatest asset, so we need to empower them with the tools and latitude to outperform other organisations so we’re not left behind.

So what does this all mean for the digital workplace? Here are four quick thoughts to leave you with.
First, roles that are focused on what we’ve been calling the Intranet will need to expand to cover the digital workplace more broadly, because the channels themselves will become more fragmented. So that means all digital systems that together form an ecosystem to power your business. Internal comms roles need to cover how information is sent to employees across devices, with the aim that we empower employees and unlock innovation, efficiency and engagement – embracing the messiness of millennials.

Wearables will become more important in the workplace, either as a complement to other devices or to drive specific use cases. Both avenues need to be explored and explored regularly because the tipping point for ROI will change as new benefits emerge from innovation and costs continue to drop

Quick wins, then marginal gains. Generating value from this additional tide of information possible within your organisation requires planning. Organisations that seek to quantify themselves and improve will – like serious athletes who look for every marginal gain – dominate.

So hopefully, your digital workplace will feel a lot less like this - one all-powerful system to rule them all, but bringing pain and misery wherever it goes…

And more like this… an ensemble of great individual components, that just work brilliantly as part of a team. We need to choose tools because they work and – critically – are designed to work with other tools really well. This doesn’t mean really expensive. In fact, the principle should be that you haven’t invested so much in it that it would cause inertia should you choose to shift away from this later.
That’s what will create a transformed digital workplace.

Provoke: Digital Workplace Transformation Trends - Jonathan Seal, Mando

Provoke: Digital Workplace Transformation Trends - Jonathan Seal, Mando