planning your digital workplace: a systems-based planning approach

Planning Your Digital Workplace:A systems-based approach to planning for Enterprise Collaboration

Christian BuckleyChief EvangelistOffice Server and Services MVP

Christian BuckleyChief Evangelist at Beezy Office Servers and Services MVP

www.beezy.net@buckleyplanet

cbuck@beezy.net

www.buckleyplanet.com

Beezy is the Intelligent Workplace for Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint, extending the feature set and improving the user experience for on-premises, cloud, and hybrid deployments. We are on a mission to transform the way people work, and to help employees be more connected, innovative, and happy. Learn more at www.beezy.net or @FollowBeezy on Twitter.

Best Office 365 Solution, ESPC 2015

Lecko Leader in information

dissemination & circulation, knowledge

management & productivity, Paris 2016

Trend Setting Product of 2016, KM World

Top 10 Intranets rated ’genuinely

enjoyable’ for employees, Digital Workplace Group

Best Intranet of 2013, Nielsen Norman Group

Best Social Collaboration

Solution, Vodafone, Chicago 2015

Most Innovative Cloud Solution, ESPC 2016

Microsoft Gold Partner

Markets are evolving fast, and organizations need to

promote new ways of working

Digital-born companies are disrupting markets and incumbents across all sectors.

Millennials and remote workers are joining organizations with the mindset of the digital consumer.

Most large organizations care a lot about their physical workplace…

But they care less about how their digital workplace looks

SharePoint

Intranet

Email

Network folders

My PC files

SAP

What is your Digital Workplace strategy?

Turn the Promises of the Digital Workplace to Reality by David Roe

http://www.cmswire.com/digital-workplace/turn-the-promises-of-the-digital-workplace-to-reality/

“In a recent CMSWire series of interviews with digital workplace

specialists, some common elements and themes emerged. One of the most

consistent is the belief that the best digital workplaces take a synergistic approach to fulfilling the wants and

needs of people through processes and technologies.”

Sharon O'Dea, an independent digital strategy consultant, specializes in intranets, social media and digital engagement. She defines the digital workplace as the place where work gets done, connecting people through an ecosystem of tools so they can be productive, informed and engaged, wherever they are.“First, it’s a means of communication top-down, bottom-up and, increasingly, peer-to-peer. Content in its myriad forms, from published pages to snippets of conversation, is the lifeblood of the digital workplace and the digital workplace is what makes that content accessible, findable and usable,” she told CMSWire.The digital workplace should also provide a gate to an organization’s knowledge while at the same time enabling organizations so that intellectual capital to be effectively captured and shared with others as more of it is produced.

Thankfully, he continues:

But where do we begin?

So many options…

Outlook Groups

Skype for Business

Yammer

Microsoft Teams

SharePoint Social

ISV solutions

Enterprise collaboration requirements can be complex Your ultimate goal is to support the entire company However, different teams and business units often

have competing priorities In an attempt to satisfy everyone, the reality is that

most planning efforts fail to satisfy anyone

In The Social Organization by Bradley and McDonald (Gartner), the authors talk about the components of successful collaboration: Community Social Purpose

Any organization that wants to deploy a digital workplace, with enterprise

collaboration at its center, would benefit from a systems-based planning approach

Systems-Based Planning What is needed is an iterative, strategic, and systems-based approach:

Identifying core business use cases and challenges at the team level Identifying use cases and challenges at the company level Performing a gap analysis between team and company levels Mapping out current state, and desired future state Working with key stakeholders to identify appropriate strategies and priorities Instituting (or reinforcing) the stakeholder review and change management

process

This approach drives stakeholder engagement, and ensures a more holistic solution that aligns with the needs of the business at every level.

Minimized Methodology Engaging leaders in a systems analysis,

identifying high-priority needs and challenges Outlining a set of targeted and strategic

actions based on common customer scenarios Developing an implementation plan to support

successful operational and improvement strategies

Minimized MethodologyAt a very high level, it is about: Assessing where you are Envisioning where you want to be Devising an implementable path to take you from “here to

there”

Brief History Lesson Systems development on a large scale was first attempted by the US military in its

Department of Defense (DOD) and by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). They were therefore instrumental in developing the framework of a sequence of stages or phases for developing a system.

Business System Planning (BSP) model: 1970s IBM initial works on BSP, it was previously for internal use only 1981, IBM issued and made available to customers Later, this method became an important tool for many organizations

In order to develop a system successfully, it is managed by breaking the total development process into smaller basic activities or phases. Any system development process, in general, is understood to have the following phases:

Analyzing Defining Designing

Practical Steps A complex method to deal with data, processes,

strategies, goals, and people, all of which are interconnected.

Business systems planning looks at the whole organization to determine what systems the business requires to fulfill its goals.

Goals are to: Understand the issues and opportunities with the current

applications, data architecture Develop a future state – and a migration path that

supports the enterprise

Provide a direction and decision-making framework Generate a blueprint for development

Outputs The goal of this process is not a final written document, a

detailed implementation plan, or even a formal budgeting exercise.

It is an organizational learning process that should result in a shared vision of what needs to be accomplished, with an understanding of all impacted systems and capabilities.

As project complexity increases, the ability for individual participants to maintain sight of the larger vision and whole will often decrease.

The Beezy Approach

The ingredients of an intelligent workplace

Communication

Collaboration

Knowledge

Processes

Communication Empowering employees and getting

them to move in the same direction demands open, fresh, and cross-hierarchical communication.

Increased communication helps employees stay aware of what is going on in different locations, departments, or management tiers.

High levels of awareness and strategic alignment lead to better decisions from the entire workforce.

Employees that are aware of the company’s direction – and are given the ability to contribute their opinion or experience – show higher levels of loyalty and engagement.

Collaboration “The whole becomes greater than the

sum of its parts.” (Aristotle)

Social collaboration capabilities, specifically, when applied to document and task management, make collaboration much more efficient.

They also make your system more rewarding and engaging by allowing people to connect and work together in different ways.

Knowledge One of the greatest failures within most

organizations is the inability to adequately document, catalog, and make retrievable the processes and experiences of employees.

Enterprise collaboration is all about capturing collective experiences – and sharing them.

When properly employed, the result is a greater retention of institutional knowledge.

Processes Business users need self-service tools

that allow them to automate routine tasks on their own, without having to ask IT for help every time.

Solutions should be accessible, allowing users and teams to connect to the right data, at the right time.

The future of collaboration and communication is about enabling employees to focus less on the technology, and more on getting their work done.

Processes

Where is your focus?

Company

EmployeeCustomer

Outcomes

Acquisition

Quality Engagement Content

Support

What is your desired business impact?

Customer

What are your business outcomes?

Engagement drives business outcomes

Acquisition

Reduce churn

Community Advocacy

Happy customers

BrandWord of Mouth

Peer to peer

education Real-time

interaction

Connect to Devs

Visibility

Examples of specific business goals might include: Reduce on-boarding time for new recruits Minimize travel time and cost Improve customer satisfaction Reduce time spent searching for information Avoid duplication of work across departments (or locations) Develop cross-hierarchical communication Increase employee empowerment and/or engagement Improve talent recruiting and retention Improve meeting efficiency and effectiveness

Use case examples might include: CEO’s assistants book board meeting dates & times in a shared

calendar Assistants updates the meeting agenda The system sends reminders to CEO about deadlines to upload

documents prior to the meeting CEO uploads documents to be presented All attendees can open and edit the documents in their laptops

during the meeting, without need to print A list of action items is created and agreed to After the meeting, documents are approved and moved to a read-

only status All content is made accessible for future search Access to content respects current privacy policies

Focus on Key Business Problems Many transformative efforts fail because key users decide to “play

with the tools” rather than take the planning process seriously.

The lack of goals and purpose quickly leads to low levels of engagement and superficial usage. Without clear goals and engaged users, you’ll never gain a clear assessment of the end results.

Take it seriously. You will be using other people’s time to make your decisions on how to move forward. Make good use of their time – and yours.

Example: Capturing Institutional Knowledge

• Captures many types of documentation• Provides structure• Taxonomy, Folksonomy• Search-driven user experience

SharePoint as a Knowledge Center

Where it fails:• Capturing tacit knowledge• Leveraging the dialog between documents• Driving the ideation process• It is only as useful as the data captured within the

platform• …and your ability to get that data back out

SharePoint as a Knowledge Center

• “Organized brainstorming”• Gathering input, sorting and refining, and implementing• Idea management is also about surfacing ideas from

your employees that may otherwise be lost within the daily shuffle

• Shared input generated by the people who live and breathe the functional tasks, and who are best positioned to identify new ways to work new methods to optimize and improve and novel innovations that could have an impact to your bottom line

Your Future State: Idea Management

Idea management must provide a method for employees to:

Current State

Future State

Identify Organizational Needs

Identify Team Needs

Identify Gaps

PrioritizeActions

What does success look like?

If you haven’t defined the end result, how do you

know when you’ve reached it?

How will you decide if your transformation is successful? Know your evaluation criteria before you start!

Set specific goals and indicators related to your business goals.

Put in place mechanisms to collect data and measure your success (or failure…) at the end of each phase.

For example, if one of your business goals is to “reduce internal communication and email overload” you might measure success by: Creating a baseline of current activity Measuring email volume today and then again after the pilot. Comparing the email open-to-read ratio Tracking the volume of “Likes” and other metrics based on the

collaboration features being used within your pilot.

• Activity within communities• Interest in content, keywords, ideas• Level of engagement• Overall platform adoption• Measuring the increase in innovation• Decreasing the cycle of new

product introduction• Sharing of content and expertise

What does this mean within enterprise collaboration?

Make it part of your ongoing support model Due to the fluid nature of enterprise collaboration, organizations today find that

implementing a true change management program to monitor and adjust based on analysis is critical.

Formation of a ‘Center of Excellence’ to both manage change and administrate your platforms is becoming the standard approach.

How can you help your employees to be more

successful?

Culture is Important

Beezy is the Intelligent Workplace solution built in

SharePoint

The perfect platformThe Microsoft stack is the most fertile ground to build a collaboration and communication solution

A powerful engineBeezy stiches the pieces of the puzzle together, ensures high performance and feature availability through its API

An award winning UXConsumer-like user experience that requires no training and will delight your employees.

Installed in a matter of hours…

Incredibly customizable!

Incredibly customizable!

User Interface ProposalIntranet Design

Wrap-Up

In my personal experience, what works is: Focus on specific business problems – and clear outcomes. Make governance and change management the priority. Look at your systems holistically, understanding both

company-wide and line of business needs – and the gaps between them.

Be prepared to regularly iterate on your strategy. Organic growth through pilots is the most sustainable model

for successful enterprise collaboration.

Share these points with your entire

team!

Download the eBookhttp://hubs.ly/H04_-P_0

Thank you very much!