February 29, 2016
There is a tremendous amount of press and discussion around the topic of Digital Transformation, and some of the key pillars of that transformation are your internal knowledge workers and the systems you use to support and grow that ever important cadre of your workforce.
In a 1992 (almost a ¼ of a century ago) Peter Drucker wrote a great piece for the Harvard Business Review called The New Society of Organizations. Like most of Drucker’s work, it is a thoughtful and prescient work of scholarly quality. In it, Drucker sagely predicts the “the shift to a knowledge society,” a time where the key mean of production – knowledge will elapse land, labour or finance. One look around the digital world today and most will agree #peterdruckerwaswise.
Yet when we stop and look upon most of the companies and organizations we see in our business, most, if not the overwhelming majority are still struggling to understand the new world. Executives and management continue to “value” tangible “things” over the intangible knowledge, collaboration, learning, etc.
There are many takeaways within that 25-year article, but the one that resonates most with me is this simple quote:
“It is information, that enables knowledge workers to do their job. An adequate information system, must lead executives to ask the right questions, not just feed them the information they expect.”
Further
"Knowledge workers still need the tools of production. In fact, capital investment in the tools of the knowledge employee may already be higher than the capital investment in the tools of the manufacturing worker ever was.”
For most companies, the backbone of that “information system” should be the corporate intranet or digital workplace. The hub where knowledge workers not only see work, but do work.
Frighteningly, as we enter almost 20 years with intranets being well adopted, most companies are still failing to understand their intrinsic value and purpose, focusing on news, or CEO messages or (#helpus) #Funnycatpictures.
Valtech has created this one page simple to read and understand graphic that distills all of the chatter of digital workplaces down to 14 key questions you need to ask yourself as an executive or intranet leader. 7 for your users. 7 for your business.
What are you doing well? What do you need help on?
