Highlighting the business challenge

In your digital workplace plan, start with articulating the business challenge(s) you are trying to solve. In general, a digital workplace helps to solve one of four key business challenges:

	Corporate Communications
	Collaboration
	Knowledge Management
	Culture and Engagement

During our strategic consulting sessions, our consultants work with you to identify and prioritize the business challenges, key requirements and propose the best solutions to help you solve them in your organization.

Playbook Tip:  Sample value proposition statement Our company struggles with isolated knowledge of their workers and our employees have a limited understanding of organizational expertise. Corporate knowledge is currently trapped in the minds, memory, and messages of our workforce, and these barriers hamper productivity, decrease employee awareness, and cripple innovation. By implementing a digital workplace solution, it will help to break down the barriers by creating connections between the people, information, and processes our employees need in order to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively. It will make you more agile, productive, and competitive.

Note: It’s important to note that there isn't one way to measure the impact of your digital workplace on your organization. Every company is different – in requirements, business objectives, culture, and way of doing business. Of course, most executives can inherently understand the value of increased dialog, greater engagement, and better knowledge sharing in the workplace. But it’s difficult to measure. 

Video: Understanding your business requirements

This video provides an overview of the digital workplace journey and the methodologies employed by Igloo to ensure its success. It reviews the ME, WE, US personas and how Igloo categorizes key business challenges into our 4 pillars (communication, collaboration, knowledge management, and culture and engagement), scores and prioritizes them against these personas to prescribe solutions that will have the biggest impact in addressing these challenges, and help improve productivity, innovation, and competitive advantage.

Aligning the plan to your corporate strategy

Your digital workplace plan must also align to your corporate strategy, which includes your mission, vision and values as well as your corporate scorecard (e.g. KPIs). Before you can begin to think about how to measure the value of your digital workplace to your organization, you need to clearly understand your business strategy. Context matters, and alignment is critical. If intangible assets don't align with the strategy, then little value can be created. Take the time to understand the pillars that drive your business forward, and how the capabilities of your intranet support key business metrics. 

When your digital workplace plan is constructed with specific corporate goals in mind, it has a much higher probability to have a positive impact on productivity, employee engagement, and innovation within your company.  We recommend starting by developing a strong understanding of your culture, strategy, and the workflows you’re trying to augment, and compare that with the goals and objectives in your plan. As you define the relevant metrics and monitor progress against your goals, you’ll gather the insight required to keep evolving, and that’s the true measure of success.

Playbook Tip: Most common business drivers Improving productivity: Increasing corporate performance across the entire company – from your employees and teams, to executives. Driving innovation: Bringing new ideas to life which accelerate your business – from process improvements to the introduction of new products and services. Creating competitive advantage: Finding ways to set yourself apart – from fostering a unique employee culture to supporting better customer engagement.

Determining the current state of your business

To achieve long term success, you need to understand the current state of your organization and/or business. Many digital workplace projects fail because they missed this step in the planning process. Your digital workplace solution must integrate seamlessly with existing corporate culture, systems, and solutions. Understanding where you're starting from also ensures you can build a solid plan for where you want to get to. 

As part of your business analysis, be sure to consider: 

• Current corporate environment
• Existing digital workplace solutions
• Technology infrastructure
• Corporate structure
• Corporate culture
• Key stakeholder groups

Profiling your key stakeholder groups

Finally, understanding the profiles and needs of your key stakeholder groups is an important element to consider as you're building your digital workplace plan and determining the value to the organization. Taking into consideration workplace personas within geographic or business unit silos will allow you to analyze the needs of your diverse digital workplace audience thoroughly. 

• Needs
• Priorities
• Challenges
• Work environment 
• Tools