The Building Blocks of Digital Transformation: Community, Tech, Business Models, and a Change Platform
I’ve been making the argument lately that the single largest obstacle in successful digital transformation is change itself. Surprisingly, the arrival of new technology is generally not the large hurdle to becoming more digital in a meaningful way, though it certainly represents a large and growing learning curve. Yet learning the new technology is manageable […]
More Evidence Online Community is Central to the Future of Work
Within the last month, two new industry reports have been released that shed important new light on how we’re going to be organizing and operating our organizations in the coming years. Many of you know my point of view in this regard: Social technology has at this point largely transformed the consumer world, yet the […]
Restructuring the C-Suite for Digital Business: The Future of the CMO, CCO, CIO, and CDO
I’ve noticed lately what appears to be an emerging trend in marketing and communications leadership in some large companies. Specifically, the positions of chief marketing officer (CMO) and chief communications officer (CCO) are sometimes being consolidated into a single role, even in very large enterprises. Such consolidation has already happened at PG&E, Walgreens, and Citi, […]
The Long Game is Winning in Digital Ecosystems, and Other Global Tech Trends
I’ve traveled nearly 70,000 miles all over the world since the beginning of the year, talking with digital practitioners in the trenches. Most often these are passionate but often frustrated change agents, IT managers grappling with tech evolution, and corporate leaders on both the technology and business side looking towards their futures and feeling uncertain. […]
Dear IT Department, Why Community Management Matters
It’s one of the curiosities of enterprise technology: Despite collaboration and engagement being an exclusively human activity — even when augmented and improved by digital tools — it’s the IT department that most often gets put in charge of rolling out said tools and then operating them long term. According to recent research by the […]
The Hardest Lesson of Digital Transformation: Designing for Loss of Control
It goes hand in hand with another key principle that sets digital strategy well apart from many other traditional ways of achieving organizational objectives. One of the counterintuitive lessons of digital and social business is that the network itself can and should do the majority of the work, if you’ll only build a little social […]
What’s Coming Next in Digital and Social in the Enterprise?
I’ve been taking a close look at what’s over the enterprise horizon for much of the year as the pace of technology change continues to accelerate, as most experts have long predicated and which will only continue. New platforms, technologies, product, services, and models are appearing at a constant pace these days. Many topics that […]
How Organizations Can Address the Challenges of Modern Digital Collaboration
It’s now clear to me that we must take bold new steps if we are to truly improve the state of workforce collaboration in most organizations. As the majority of us are doing it today, digital collaboration is largely stuck in the doldrums. The known issues are numerous: The tools themselves are either too complex, […]
How Digital Collaboration is Fragmenting, and Why It’s a Major Opportunity
A significant issue has been developing in digital collaboration for the last several years, and it’s now starting to become somewhat acute. I’m referring here to the pronounced trend towards app, environment, and channel fragmentation. Over the last few of years, I have been speaking with beleaguered IT managers who are struggling to cope with […]
How Should Organizations Actually Go About Digital Transformation?
This is now the question that is top of mind in a large number of enterprises today, as speeding up adaptation to rapidly evolving digital markets is now not just a requirement to grow today, but increasingly to survive. This is not incautious language and I’ve been pointing to the relatively urgent data for several […]
