Digital Transformation is the mainstay of our business at 4OC. At the heart of many of our engagements is supporting organisations’ ambition to use both technology and data to refine, understand and improve the provision of value to customers. Never more so that through this crisis.

The current pandemic has further focussed attention on the need for organisations to adopt and adapt both new technologies and new ways of working so they can continue to deliver service to their communities. To that end, we have already had some success working in partnership with clients to enable service provision through employing innovative solutions or testing new ways of applying existing technology.

 

So, what Digital Transformation has worked?

What many of our customers have done is to implement simple, swift change using new, and for that matter some not so new, technologies.

Orbit Group, a large Housing Association based in the Midlands and East, rapidly implemented a substantial change to their business model using Office 365 functionality, which had been deployed over the previous year. What that meant is that  many of their teams, who can now work remotely, have been able to continue delivering critical services to their customers.

Cloud-based services, understandably, have been at the heart of this. They have enabled a lot our customers to operate effectively while still adhering to the lockdown measures. Whether using increasingly powerful productivity suites (Office365, GSuite), feature rich video conferencing facilities (Zoom, Teams) or cloud-based vertical solutions such as those delivered in the Housing space (Housing Partner’s AIM solutions), presence is now much less of a challenge than it has ever been.

We have witnessed many examples of this Digital Transformation in action with, for example, Microsoft counting 32 million daily active users of Teams in the first week of March. This spiked to 44 million just one week later.

 

And what do you need to consider?

A lot of what we do is to enable staff to operate in a range of complex scenarios. Right now, getting the required level access for staff is the urgent challenge that managers have to solve. Once that has been done, the next key area of focus will relate to operational concerns.

We are currently actively supporting our customers in addressing issues related to a shift to working with remote teams. To ensure this happens, your organisation will need a structured and rigorous framework to continue to maintain productivity and wellbeing, not just for the first few weeks, but into the medium to long term.

One of the team, Paul West, has been working with customers on applying a structured approach to ensuring the ongoing health of remote teams and addresses the key areas that you need in order to maintain a healthy organisation. He talks about 5 key areas of focus:

 

• Communication: Striking the right balance between over-communicating and leaving people in the dark is the challenge. Harvard Business Review talk about regular interaction, not losing members of the team along the way, but also generating a more social aspect (recreating the water cooler)
• Cohesion: Generating a sense of team. Across a number of our projects, the teams have generated principles or charters that underpin ways of working
• Community Connection: Wider connections across the organisation are important to generating a well-oiled working environment. Fostering engagement across the organisation can be a challenge in a remote environment.
• Capability: Ensuring that teams and individuals maintain the development of skills and capabilities to complement the wider ambitions of the organisation. Learning can be difficult in a remote environment as it can challenge people’s learning styles.
• Continuity: Once the novelty of the new working model has lapsed, how do you maintain an environment that continues to perform whilst ensuring the wellbeing of staff

The challenge for organisations going through a Digital Transformation, including ours, is to design new working environments to address both the functional aspects of delivery (performance, quality, reporting, stakeholder engagement) but equally vital are the wider needs of the teams and organisation. Digital Transformation programmes need to address both aspects in order to provide viable long-term solutions.

 

The good news is that the digital solution platforms are arriving with the capabilities to support both of these challenges. We are working with organisations to set up Zoom for large scale management and training development needs, developing new means of running workshops across large stakeholder groups using Teams and a variety of Digital Whiteboard products (e.g. Miro), while also challenging ourselves to maintain a social element to the business.

Indeed, last week in our Friday 4 O Clock, we had a brilliant quiz run by another member of the team, Kim, which while unfairly targeted at the younger members of the team (I’m not bitter), was a really nice way to keep the 4OC spirit alive and well!

 

John Curran