When developing a digital workplace roadmap, many organizations get to the point where they understand their business objectivesand have taken inventory, only to stall out before making decisions about tradeoffs.
As a result, they may know what’s desirable in their digital workplace, but haven’t decided what’s actually feasible. Unless you spend the time to clarify the tradeoffs, people tend to focus on the newest, flashiest solutions, rather than focusing on the most meaningful results.
For example, let’s say there’s a lot of enthusiasm for enterprise social capabilities, so you decide to roll out Yammer. Your content may be a complete mess, but the prospect of organizing it isn’t nearly as attractive as rolling out a new social tool. However, that content is something the entire company needs to rely on day in and day out.
A lot of what goes into planning a successful digital workplace isn’t sexy — like organizing your content, applying metadata and creating your taxonomy design, and then applying all of that structure when you migrate your content. These processes take time and effort, but the end result is more organized, searchable content, which helps improve findability and usability.
If you push information design and content organization to the back burner in order to allocate budget to more aesthetic aims like graphic elements for your homepage, you’re probably going to end up dumping all of your old files into SharePoint Online, without improving its functionality or usability.
That’s why it’s important to start thinking in terms of reconciling what’s desirable and what’s feasible. You can’t do everything.
Striking a Balance Between Desirable And Feasible
A key activity at this stage is to have moderated workshops with key stakeholders. You gather all of your source material, inventory and business objectives, and start making specific decisions about what problems to pursue and what problems to put aside.
These workshops are helpful in validating feedback about what’s been learned up to that point, then walking through the possibilities and mapping them on a matrix with criteria that makes sense for the organization. It’s essentially a consensus-building exercise, aimed at getting everyone on board with what’s most important and making them comfortable with the tradeoffs.
Learn more about helping your organization leverage today’s digital workplace capabilities by downloading our free e-book, Your Roadmap To The Digital Workplace: A Step-By-Step Guide For Professional Services Firms.
