Being Digital Means Creating Personalised Experiences
This point in history combines a unique set of circumstances. It’s Moore’s Law meets the internet — a concoction of velocity and connectedness we’ve never had before. Umpteen years ago, we could have said something similar about the steam engine and the industrial revolution — new possibilities abound.
The possibilities today come from our connectedness and the acceleration of technology, powered by continuous innovation. And while we’re on a trajectory that continues to gather speed, something else is changing — our demographics, and our reactions to all these new possibilities. How is digital transformation changing our workplace? Simple: it’s changing the nature of the way we work, from technology- or process-led to experience-led.
By 2020, 50 per cent of the workforce will be millennials (those born after 1980). They have a particular set of workplace behaviours, including openness, collaboration, a freewheeling style, an affinity with change. They’ve been born digital.
This makes the digital workplace a new frontier for business. We must learn how to embrace digital enablement and integrate it with strategies from HR. This convergence of IT and HR can create a workplace that’s agile, flexible and productive; a workplace that can fuel its own continuous innovation.
Creating the right workplace for the emerging generation of workers requires a dynamic and intelligent digital platform that will allow each business to create its own ecosystem of composable services. The digital workplace puts the user at the centre – a place where we consume and interact with the services that allow us to do our jobs, to collaborate and to be productive.
Being digital means creating personalised experiences – for workers, partners and customers alike. For years, organisations followed the same ideology that failed in IT – pushing the information out. That’s the wrong way. We must take an outside-in perspective and develop compelling experiences to support what people need to do in their work.
Just giving me a mobile app on a device doesn’t enhance my experience. It’s not personalised to me. It doesn’t support the decisions that I need to make, because it has no contextual awareness for me. The notion of ‘me’ – how something works for me and how you understand what my attributes and needs are – is vital. Welcome to the future of work and the new workplace centered on ‘me’.