Digital culture is like the wind. It is invisible, yet its effects can be seen and felt. When it is blowing in your direction, it makes for a smooth flight. When it is blowing against you, everything is more turbulent.
Digital culture is a subjective work; it varies from person to person and company to company. For a healthcare organisation, digital culture means using digital and to provide better patient care.
For an automotive company, it means using digital technology to provide a better in-car experience or better servicing experience. For some companies, it is as simple as getting their workforce to look at the right reports and not find the data manually.
IT Infrastructure has become the backbone of most organisations. Even an independent newsagent shop cannot run without an effective POS Solution. For most businesses, the IT ecosystem has become the fabric that connects their workforce. You can use IT Asset Management Software to understand and influence the digital culture of your organisation.
Damm Group (makers of Estrella Damm) are one of Europe’s well-known breweries. They used HP’s ITAM and ITSM tools to drive the IT service provided to their employees. After understanding how their employees use IT, they will adopt Digital strategies that help their employees to be more productive. (Read the case study here.)
As Luis Miguel Martin, CIO of Damm Group, said:
“We have met our targets for improving IT governance and the management and control of the services our IT department provides our users. This has provided guarantees that allow us to continue to tackle new digital transformation processes and respond quickly to the requirements of a growing business like ours.”
IT Asset Management and IT Service Management are the prominent tools that manage your IT Infrastructure and can provide you the insights to drive digital culture in your favour.
Understand the Digital Skills of Your Workforce
A recent (July 2017) study by Jeremy Goldman published on Harvard Business Review suggests that nearly half of companies say they don’t have the digital skills they need. In PwC’s 2017 Global Digital IQ Survey, 52% rated their digital IQ as strong. Compare that with 67% and 66% in 2016 and 2015, respectively. The survey, conducted among 2,200 technology executives, identified critical skill gaps such as cybersecurity and privacy.
The first step is to understand the Digital IQ of your organisation, and one of the best places to understand it from is your ITSM or Internal Help Desk Solution. The real insight is hidden in those small incidents that your employees log. Phishing emails, can’t use Intranet, Self-Service is hanged, a computer running slow, VPN access issues, and so on.
These incidents can be categorised into three (Digital IQ) categories:
- Digital usability and application,
- Cybersecurity, and
- Privacy.
The next step is to map users and departments into the above categories. You will get a good view of your organisation’s digital quotient.
The above approach works for a large dataset, at least 1000’s of incidents from your ITSM or Help Desk solution.
If your teams are not using your ITSM or Help Desk solution, then you may want to revisit its suitability, an approach adopted by M&C Saatchi.
M&C Saatchi is renowned worldwide as a top advertising agency. Their existing ITSM tool was deemed to be inflexible and was not well adopted by their users. After their move to Freshservice, they saw a 300% increase in self-service adoption. It is vital that you map the digital IQ of your company based on data provided by a good number of incidents.
Build Digital Landmarks to Develop Digital Skills
Once you have understood the Digital IQ of your company, there are really some simple (not easy) landmarks you can build to develop your winning digital culture.
Whilst it is fashionable to focus on AI/Machine Learning, Chat Bots, Internet of Things, Big Data, Cloud and the rest, the Digital IQ of your workforce can be developed by implementing the solutions (for the problems) that you have identified from your IT Service Management Solution.
Your Intranet can be your landmark for enhancing the Digital IQ of your workforce. Your employees deliver your customer experience via the Intranet. If your Intranet is built for your employees, it almost drives your organisation. Here is the detailed article on how and why Intranet can be a landmark asset to drive your digital culture.
The key element with training is understanding trainee requirements. Quite often ‘One Size Fits All’ let us go through 465 Powerpoint slides and going through some really simple use cases is the approach to training. As Richard Catrambone, Professor in the School of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests, the two fundamental aspects of training are:
- Knowing what the trainee wants;
- Training is best delivered by a subject-matter expert.
Leverage Digital Ambassadors as a Driving Force
A case study example here is British Airways. BA uncovered digital talent by simply asking their employees if they had any digital skills. A section of their employees were running websites on a part-time basis and also agreed to drive digital innovation at BA.
A typical workforce today is made up of experienced workforce and millennials – leveraging their collective skills is a powerful way to drive your organisation’s digital IQ.