How to Control The Digital Chaos in Your Organization
How Well is Your Internal Collaboration Process Working?
Whether you know it or not, your organization is suffering from some degree of digital chaos. There are just too many collaboration tools freely available and, unless you are a bank or a government agency, it’s virtually guaranteed that people in your organization are using a range of these new tools.
Who Should Read This Post
This post is for you if you struggling with this issue or if you have a nagging feeling that your internal collaboration just isn’t working quite right.
Your most important and constrained asset is your people’s time. Too many collaboration tools will confuse your processes and waste valuable time that you can never recover.
People want to communicate and collaborate quickly and easily and that’s their rationale for adopting these new tools. But people communicate differently and what works for one person may not work well for others. So, what do you do?
Get the Lay of Your Land
First of all, you need to understand where you stand. Survey your organization — or begin with a key team if your organization is large — about the social collaboration tools they are using and what gap those tools are filling. You can do it anonymously if you like. SurveyMonkey is a quick and easy survey tool.
Once you have the lay of the land, you need to think about how they fit with your IT governance plan. Alistair Webb of Innosis Consulting has written an excellent piece about how to govern these tools most effectively: The Antidote for Digital Workplace Chaos: Governance.
The Millennials, soon to be a majority in the workplace, and the rising Generation Z cohorts communicate differently and you need to work those differences into your internal communication and collaboration strategy.
What to Do Monday Morning*
Survey your key teams about the social collaboration tools they are using and why. You can do it anonymously if you like. SurveyMonkey is a quick and easy tool. Once you have that data, review your collaboration map and processes and identify what needs to be fixed and what governance and guidance you need to apply.
*When I was at business school at UCLA we did everything through case studies. We had an operations professor who constrained us to succinctly summarize the case’s key points on one written page. The key part of each case evaluation was our recommendation on what we would do “Monday Morning” to fix the problem.
