Jane McConnell: Digital Workplace is driven by the idea to support the customer-facing process!

This week on Monday the Digital Workplace Trends Report 2014 by Jane McConnell has been released and published. The report represents the results of Jane McConnell’s yearly research on the latest evolution for the corporations to adopt to the digital workplace. This year 314 corporate project leads have answered the questionaire – from a variety of industries, sizes and maturity stages within the digital workplace adoption. The core idea of this year’s research was to conduct not only the establishment and implementation of a “digital workplace” but also to analyze the background of driving factors for the realization of the digital workplace.

The “digital workplace” – in the sense of the research – is defined as the combination of all digital tools supporting a digital way of working. So the study’s research focus is based on a holistic view of the digital transformation – not limiting to just social platforms: Conducting data on the understanding and the establishment of a new way of digital enabled, collaborative and connected working. To analyze the driving forces and factors the research uses an underlying model of capability, enabler and mindset criterias. So the question was – does the company has the “capabilities”, the “enabling” ingrediants and the “mindset” to tackle the vision of the digital workplace.

Here are the slides of the presentation that Jane generously shared on Slideshare:

Digital Workplace in the Connected Organization – Enterprise 2.0 from Jane McConnell

(We will shortly also release the recording for her talk!)

At the end of Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT I had the chance to get hold of Jane for a short interview. In this interview she highlights the key trends of the report:

The digital workplace is becoming much more focussed on serving the customer-facing workforce.
The digital workplace establishes digital enabled organizational communities as a complementary custodian for knowledge that overcome the silos of the organization.
The digital workplace is becoming an environment for realtime work empowerment – by the use of realtime communications tools.

But though the understanding and perception of the “digital workplace” is on its way the realization is still at its beginning. This resonates very well with the overall consensus of the conference: The corporate world has advanced in the understanding of potential and also of the mechanics of the social and connected enterprise but naturally the change of company takes time.