Workplace Innovation

Conclusion: The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ annual innovation survey gives financial evidence to the rhetoric on innovation. The data presents strategic directions which could produce wider changes too, such as full casualisation in employment, coupled with technology investment by large businesses and structural underutilisation and deskilling, although more trend data is required to qualify such a view in future.

Senior technology executives ought to take note of this economy-wide picture of investment strategies in order to understand their own initiatives in a wider context. It may help with policy setting, with business cases, and provide a better view of planning evolution over the next two years.

Conclusion: It is widely recognised that public sector organisations do not have the same market drivers as private enterprise to be able to innovate in the same way. Drivers such as competitive forces and profit incentives stimulate and support breakthrough innovation. However, by understanding the elements that are active when breakthrough innovation occurs and reframing it within the context of the government sector, significant benefits and progress can be achieved.

Conclusion: User-centricity, positive customer experiences (CX) and active customer engagement are the necessary central drivers of any business’ digital transformation.

Customer experience trends and issues need to be addressed methodically using a checklist to produce the necessary reviews of current approaches and plans to transform them into best practices.

Systematic use of the tools contained in contact centres, customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, algorithms in apps and communications-enabled business process will be the only responsible path for enterprises committed to improving their customer experience.

Conclusion: Office 365, like Google Apps, holds the potential to impact workplace practices through new collaboration capabilities such as real-time co-authorship. However, this potential may only be realised if activities for the Office 365 environment go beyond the traditional post-implementation review plan. Instead, organisations wishing to see genuine changes must create a post-implementation review plan which must assess the extent to which business benefits have been delivered over the long-term.

Conclusion: The high-risk and high-reward Agile approach for systems development enabled many organisations to respond quickly to changing management strategies and yielded significant productivity benefits, according to a 2015 survey1.

However the same survey found not everyone has been so successful, as lack of experience in using the Agile approach, and organisation resistance to change, have frustrated almost the same number of organisations.

Once IT and business management have decided that Agile is the right approach they must:

• Champion and defend its use
• Actively track progress and allocate extra resources to the project if justified
• Provide a safe environment in which a retrospective review can be conducted
• Widely disseminate the lessons learned from the review, including strategies that succeeded and failed, without attributing blame

Conclusion: Deployment of Office 365 as a pure Cloud solution has lagged the sales of Office 365 licences. This is partly due to lack of formal migration strategies, confusion over the licensing and user options¹, although non-technical issues play a bigger role. To assist in the move to Office 365, IBRS has identified a framework that will assist organisations in their journey.

Conclusion: Deployment of Office 365 as a pure Cloud solution has lagged the sales of Office 365 licences. This is largely due to IT groups’ unfamiliarity with the Office 365 environment: unlike Office Professional, Office 365 can be run across new devices, provides real-time collaboration¹ and offers new tools based on analytics. Simply replacing Office Professional with Office 365 will not deliver new value to the organisation: it will simply move the organisation from a CapEx to an OpEx model. Organisations should view Office 365 as a set of services that support the broader digital workspaces strategy. Organisations first identify the business benefits being sought and create a future state vision for end-user computing. Investments in Office 365 may then be used to support the digital workspace strategy, and a deployment plan developed.

To assist in deployment planning, IBRS has developed a framework that will assist organisations in their journey to Office 365.

Conclusion: Progressing digital transformation strategies requires a much more holistic view of service delivery and extends beyond existing business process review and business systems improvement. Designing services that support digital transformation objectives need to look at the end to end service including customer experience. Traditional business analysis activities that captured the requirements of the business process owner and are used to implement business systems will not be adequate.

This Compass expands upon the initial discussion presented in the IBRS Master Advisory Presentation, “Digital Workspaces: Enabling the Future Workplace.”¹It outlines IBRS Workspaces Strategy Framework that can guide the development of your end user computing strategy that embraces evolving work practices, such as mobility, activity based working, and self-service.

Conclusion: To achieve workplace assimilation of new or replacement business systems, staff must be well trained and convinced it is in their best interests to become proficient operatives. For assimilation to become a reality a comprehensive workplace change management program, that includes a systems training strategy, must be developed.

Workspaces: At the next desktop upgrade an organisation has two options: It can incrementally improve the desktop, using 20-year-old assumptions, or create a new end user computing platform based on modern technology trends. In this IBRS master advisory presentation (MAP), IBRS outlines the high-level issues surrounding the future of the Digital Workspace from both a business and technology viewpoint.

This MAP is designed to guide and stimulate discussion between business and technology groups, and point the way for more detailed activity. It also provides links to further reading to support these follow-up activities.

Conclusion: It has been well established in recent reports that future workplaces will be significantly different from today and the workers of tomorrow will demand to work differently. Technology has enabled organisations to provide greater freedom to their workers with a new, greater understanding of the strength and weaknesses of flexible working. In addition, organisations will gradually casualise their workforce for greater flexibility. Organisations that fully harness the potential of providing highly flexible or flexible and creative workplaces early will be able to attract and retain the best talent for their workforce. Other organisations will be forced to adapt as work roles and practices disappear or change radically.

Conclusion: moving to an activity based working (ABW) environment is a complex multifactor project. Organisations can take stock of their readiness to approach activity based working by using the maturity model. The model will assist in developing the planning criteria required for any ABW strategy.

Conclusion: innovation is top of mind for many CEOs across Australia. In fact, more than 86 % recognise that they need to invest more in R&D and innovation as part of the company strategy. However, there is a significant gap between the aspirations of organisations and the reality of innovation within these companies and entities. Knowing what behaviours should be demonstrated and having a plan will improve the alignment between goals and achievements. Most CIOs are being asked to drive innovation for the business, yet innovation is still more rhetoric than substance.

Conclusion: Some organisations succeed at innovation better than others. To do so requires insight and an ability to understand how an organisation can function differently.

Innovation requires fresh thinking and different approaches. It demands attention on the value chain and business process in order to develop alternatives that will solve old issues.

Conclusion: Organisations across Australia are talking about innovation. Having a structured approach for idea management within organisations is critical as is receiving executive support and appropriate funding for new ideas. However, thinking differently about problems and opportunities will be a key competency in the drive for innovation. One approach such as design thinking is being utilised to great effect in other countries. There are some local occurrences but Australia is lagging and needs to take action to catch up.

Conclusion:Virtual teams continue to be an accepted organisation mode as a means of grouping specialist and project resources together to achieve high quality outcomes. Recent research¹ identifies that more than 40% or Fortune 500 companies currently utilise virtual teaming. Smaller organisations have found that technology tools provide the mechanisms to collaborative cost effectively. A key activity of virtual teams is collaborating on research, projects and reports. Understanding the purpose of the collaborative authoring activity, the personality preferences of the authors and the relationship of the authors can enable organisations to increase the quality of the output with less effort and in less elapsed time.

Conclusion: Organisations have been slowly and organically embracing virtual team management models over the past few years and there is every indication that this is the model of the future. Managing virtual teams and developing highly functional communities have been largely hit and miss. There are still many instances of dysfunctional teams exacerbated by the tyranny of distance. Systemically assessing the virtual distance within an organisation can provide insights and assist executive managers to develop and implement initiatives to significantly increase the effectiveness of virtual teams.

Conclusion: Innovation is becoming increasingly important in the 21^st century organisation, whether it be companies growing or keeping their customers or the public sector, trying to deliver services with ever decreasing budget – innovation will play a key role as established models for business processes become increasingly under strain. A crucial part of innovation is ideas management. Ideas management involves how to generate and capture ideas, how to select and progress ideas and how to diffuse ideas.

Many organisations focus on the tools and technology available to improve idea management within their organisation, but this ignores the other important elements including strategy, people and processes, resulting in a low level of maturity and often a poor performance of implementing ideas. Improving maturity across all the elements of idea management increases the opportunity to find the best ideas and get them implemented. While a high level of maturity across all elements may not be feasible or desirable, organisations should identify those areas that are important and ensure they optimise these.

Conclusion: Deciding to transition the organisation to activity based working (ABW) will be complicated by meeting various stakeholder interests and aligning the organisation’s culture. In this sense it may involve several iterations. Each one refined from lessons of the previous one.To reduce risk it is essential that the ABW checklist be precise about the objectives and the organisation’s capacity to transition to a new working model.

Conclusion: The concept of innovation has been gaining wider acceptance in the past few years, particularly in line with the explosion of the Internet and social media. However, many organisations are still following the model that new ideas will be generated by the clever people within the organisation or will come from those external partners that are already known to the organisation. This outdated model does not provide the opportunity for organisations to identify great ideas that could provide significant benefit to their organisation. There is growing adoption of a broader based innovation method known as ‘Open Innovation’ that offers considerable benefit to organisations that embrace it.

Conclusion: In the search for a competitive edge more organisations are looking to activity-based working (ABW). It is not a quick or low cost option. Some of the apparent benefits and merits may also lack demonstrable certainty. However the workplace is changing rapidly for some types of information workers. IT should understand ABW, its potential and pitfalls, and be prepared to engage the rest of the organisation.

ABW is not a rational method to cut the cost of office rent. Nor is it a recycling of ‘hot-desking’, or any other 30YO buzz phrase. ABW is a broad and substantial change to working practices. Realising an ABW project involves thorough planning and a set of objectives. It also requires a flexible interpretation of the outcomes because not everything can be measured in perfect quantities.

Conclusion: Whether it be market pressures, skills shortages, budget shortfalls or a combination of these factors, it is important for organisations to imbed a culture of innovation into their businesses; not only to address the many issues facing them today, but also for the inevitable challenges that will arise in the future. There are no hard and fast rules for an innovative organisation. CIOs may be concerned that embarking on innovation activities may be costly, time consuming or a distraction from the more immediate operational needs of the organisation. Conversely, CIOs may be looking for ways to increase morale and build closer relationships with business areas within their organisation.

Conclusion: For outsourced IT or business processes, innovation that is measurable and practical must be managed and aligned with your outsourcing provider. The further up the business value chain you engage in offshoring and outsourcing, the more critical this development and integration of innovation becomes. Unfortunately in practice this has proven more difficult. As a result, innovation in outsourcing contracts has been lacking. This lack of success has led to questions around the actual potential for outsourcing to provide innovation. of the actual capability for outsourcing and innovation.

Conclusion: During the GFC many organisations lost their innovation mojo. As economic rationalism reigned, organisational cultures became stale, research and development budgets were cut and fresh ideas stopped flowing.

Conclusion: The combination of new requirements for quality control in software development and the looming skills crisis in Asia will drive multiple initiatives in the software industry. These initiatives include: vendor consolidation (particularly in platforms); a fundamental shift in the role of internal IT organisations; and an explosion of innovative and pragmatic mini-applications that are developed and owned by the business unit rather than traditional IT departments. Because these mini-apps are driven and owned by the business unit, they are more aligned to business needs than the current wave of mismatched ‘collaborative Web 2.0’ applications.