Every Friday, we prepare for you a short digest with news covering subjects related to employee engagement, collaboration, organizational culture, knowledge sharing, leadership and the future of work.
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Here’s this week’s brief:
“Technologies are tools. And as…
…the lifecycle of these tools accelerates — and we move from creating gigabytes, to terabytes to petabytes of information per day — people will actually become more important. You will need to recruit and invest in people who have the skills to keep up, who treat change as the only constant. They will have to deal with information and data overload on a scale that would make us weep, in order to extract the valuable knowledge and apply it to innovate. The skills of your people to intuitively use data analytics, answer the difficult questions, to create and reuse knowledge in order to innovate will put knowledge management at the forefront of your ability to keep up with the acceleration of change. Because knowledge management — like any other management discipline — is largely about people.” Read Jed Cawthorne’s latest article How Do We Keep Up, Let Alone Innovate? for CMSWire.
“Companies must become more…
…innovative to better respond to the highly competitive, global business environment. Collaboration is indispensable for innovation, both within the company’s own boundaries and beyond, with customers, partners, startups, universities, and research communities. Companies must rethink their structures and culture to better deal with new market environments and business models. The hierarchic organization that prevailed in the 20th century’s production-oriented industrial economy will not work in the more global and fast-changing digital economy. Inventing effective organizations for the digital economy is the grand challenge for our time, and the companies that are already adapting are leading the way.” Read The 4 Things It Takes to Succeed in the Digital Economy by Lindsey Anderson and Irving Wladawsky-Berger for Harvard Business Review.
“Forget the rigid corporate ladder…
…now the corporate lattice allows free-flowing ideas and career paths. The new diverse workforce, combined with technological advances, has fed demand for a more collaborative and flexible working environment.” Cathy Benko, vice-chairman of Deloitte in San Francisco and co-author of The Corporate Lattice estimates that companies have “flattened out” by about 25% over the past 25 years, losing several layers of management in favour of a more grid-like structure, where ideas flow along horizontal, vertical and diagonal paths. A recent report on the future workplace reveals how the workplace is evolving and what employers need to do successfully to manage employee wellbeing over the next 15 years. One of the key findings of the survey was that in order to attract and retain high-calibre employees, companies need to foster a more collaborative environment. Read Five ways work will change in the future by Killian Fox and Joanne O’Connor for The Guardian.
In recent years, companies have begun…
…to look beyond existing collaboration models for new ways to engage and interact with employees. With so much of the conversation happening on digital channels, businesses must rethink how they engage with employees, leveraging the enormous potential of social tools to facilitate collaboration and advance business goals. Of course, not all social collaboration strategies are created equal. One of the crucial steps business leaders must take to ensure they’re using best practices when developing a social collaboration strategy is setting a clear social collaboration agenda. “Setting uniform collaboration goals is especially important for large organizations with multiple divisions or offices. Without a clearly defined, company-wide strategy, different departments may begin to use different tools, resulting in lost opportunities for cooperation and connection. Remember: The goal is to facilitate dialogue on an enterprise level, and being consistent with the tools you use will help you to achieve this objective.” Read 5 Social Collaboration Best Practices by Andrew Wilson, CIO at Accenture for Enterprise Apps Today.
“Digital transformation is disrupting…
…traditional business models,” says Bonnie D. Graham, host of SAP Radio’s Meet the Visionary Game-Changers. “Smaller, more agile firms are better able now to compete against the big behemoths”. Brian Fanzo, chief social media officer at MyChannel Inc says that “I don’t like people doing technology for technology’s sake”. He then went on to identify one of those critical core strategies that he thinks is being reshaped by today’s digital economy. “I believe the future of innovation is collaboration,” Fanzo said. But in the past, he explained, the word “collaboration” typically meant working only with those people in your office or local area. Hyper-connectivity and the virtual workplace are changing that mindset. Fanzo sees digital collaboration as the ability to work “without borders” and the freedom to leverage the best talent and business resources from anywhere.”. Read Does Company Size Matter In A Digital Economy? by SAP’s John Ward for Forbes.
Happy Knowledge Sharing!
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