Highlighting the business challenge

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

• Corporate Communications
• Collaboration
• Knowledge Management
• Culture and Engagement
  

During your strategic consulting sessions, our consultants work with you to identify and prioritize business challenges, proposing the best solutions to address them. These challenges are a good place to start when creating a value proposition statement and an executive summary for your digital workplace.

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: There isn't one way to measure the impact of your digital workplace. Every company is different – in requirements, business objectives, culture, and way of doing business. While most executives can inherently understand the value of increased dialog, greater engagement, and better knowledge sharing in the workplace, they can be difficult to measure. 

Understanding your business requirements

Focusing on key business challenges and workplace personas, you can better understand your organization's business requirements. Looking on these challenges, personas, and requirements at the same time, you can begin to prioritize the solutions that will have the biggest impact on your organization. 

Aligning the plan to your corporate strategy

Your digital workplace plan must also align with 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, 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 digital workplace 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