How to bring your people on your digital evolution journey

For some time now, I’ve been championing the need for organizations everywhere to adopt a mindset of digital evolution rather than digital transformation to succeed in the new world of work. And that’s because the big investment, big reward ethos of digital transformation is high risk – especially when it goes wrong.

In the post-pandemic world of work businesses must adopt an evolutionary mindset and focus on the continual adoption and refinement of new and emerging technologies to achieve identified business outcomes. And the key to that, is ensuring your people are enrolled and engaged in your digital journey. 

As an IT professional you will know that people fail to embrace digital evolution because they’re apprehensive about – even afraid of – tech development. But you can help them by sharing specific knowledge, upskilling, and taking the fear out of digital. 

Greig Johnston

Greig Johnston is CEO at Vidatec and a former CTO. He has worked in the technology sector for over 25-years, buying and selling technology services. He specializes in helping businesses of all sizes develop digital strategies that deliver an exceptional end user experience on mobile and web.

This inclusive, people-centered approach also means that responsibility doesn’t just sit with the tech team but is shared across the whole organization. It also means increased resilience, greater innovation, and creativity – which benefits all tech professionals. 

Map your stakeholders

For digital evolution to be successful, it’s essential to map and group your stakeholders, then make sure you establish effective communication channels to ensure there is a constant flow of information in both directions.

As well as internal stakeholders, customers are also a key group to consider. Customers will give you brilliant insights about what they love (and don’t love) about your digital offerings, and how they currently use them versus what they wish they could use them for.

Finally reach out to any partners, external consultants, and industry experts – often, the view from the outside is quite different, and very revealing. You could make way for new ideas that could revolutionize the way you think about your digital offerings.

Consider the ‘change mindset’ of your people

There could be any number of reasons why your people are resistant to digital evolution – a lack of leadership alignment, corporate red tape, or a false belief about the scale and complexity of the change. 

At Vidatec, for example, we’ve found ‘hackathon’ days are particularly effective at bringing colleagues together and helping everyone become part of the solution. 

To manage this process, it often helps to frame hackathon sessions with a problem statement, such as a solution to a customer or organizational challenge. 

Enable ‘citizen developers’

It’s just as likely that your people believe tech should be left to the experts. 

But low-code/no-code platforms – including Microsoft Power Platform and Zapier – are great at turning non-developers into ‘citizen developers’ by empowering them to build tools and workflows to integrate and share data between different apps and platforms. 

Tech professionals can support and nurture this approach by providing case studies and best practice examples.

Upskilling opportunities

While in-depth continuous development is essential for tech teams, it’s also incredibly useful to broaden perspectives and develop the digital skill sets of everyone in your organization. 

Areas for upskilling could include:

• GDPR awareness, data protection and cybersecurity risks
• Understanding agile product development and knowing how to engage with your end-user/audience
• Knowing how to use customer/end-user advocacy to drive positive referrals for your digital products and services 
• Understanding how to use analytics to ‘design by data’ when creating digital products/services. 

Other opportunities

Elsewhere, there are other simple, people-centric things you can do to enroll and engage your people in your digital evolution journey. 

These could include: 

• Use collaborative tools and platforms such as MS Teams, Slack, Jira, Asana, Miro and Trello
• Create a best practice culture by actively sharing previous experiences
• Assemble cross-functional project teams and regularly hold joint planning and decision-making sessions
• Work collaboratively to identify challenges, pain points and opportunities 

Organizations can also use a common, shared scoring criteria – that means something to the organization – when assessing priorities in terms of features, capabilities, and decisions. 

Pandora's concept of ‘engineering dollars’ is an example of a good approach to help non-technical stakeholders weigh the benefits of features versus the development effort required to build them. 

For your digital evolution journey to be successful, you must have the right people, engaged in the right way at the right time. That’s because people are your primary resource: commitment is contagious, and success breeds success.