This Digital Transformation WILL be user driven.
Summary: The next wave of digital transformation will be driven by the end user, and it will be a shared experience driven by new tools and ideas supported by connected communities.
I don’t believe that Digital Transformation is one massive tsunami of innovation that will change every aspect of what we do, rather it will be continual series of waves, some more dramatic than others, and each will bring its own form of impact and change, so will Digital Transformation ever be done? Probably not, but as the greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “Change is the only constant”.
Since the COVID pandemic hit us worldwide (let’s hope that one day we can read about COVID in the history books), organizations great and small rushed to digitize many aspects of their business, either the way they engage customers, the work environment for their employees, or the processes of the business themselves. Research will tell you through this change some organizations have been able to realize competitive advantage, while others have ground to catch-up. One thing was clear though, the majority of the work environment was the core focus for many transformations was infrastructure, the back-end, the things that most end-users necessarily see or directly control.
I propose though, that the next transformation will be entirely driven by the end user, with the support of IT of course (we can’t do without those incredible people). The end user will redefine the work experience, the tools they use, the services they consume, and the processes they work with. Supporting this idea, are three factors I have observed over the last two years.
- Constrained technology support models
- The boom of niche productivity apps and services
- The connectedness of innovator communities
Lets dig in to these areas a little (afterall, if you have gotten this far, and I am very appreciative that you are willing to explore this idea with me, thank you)…
Constrained Technology Support Models
It is no doubt that IT was, and still is under incredible pressure to deliver business services to a workforce that was mandated to work remotely overnight, and even as we move in to a new business model that encourages balance in work experiences via hybrid work schemes that pressure doesn’t seem to be getting any lighter anytime soon. This pressure means that IT departments have had to ruthlessly prioritise where they invest their time and efforts to be able to address the larger challenges. The antithesis of this is that the opportunities addressing the small departmental, or that of the individual user has had to be deprioritized for the greater good.
Work still needs to get done though, and users did not sit still… working remotely, on their own connectivity, on their own rules, the end user grew to support themselves, and even beyond that, but we will talk about that a little later. This new involuntary support model overtime became less of a frustration for users and evolved in to moments of innovation.
This concept of end-user innovation both supported and enabled the next factor, the boom of niche productivity apps and services.
The boom of niche productivity apps and services
In the good old days (yes ok I am a bit old) building and deploying an application was tough… you chose a language, you built your application from the ground up (maybe you reused some code from your toolbox) and then you had to work out how to distribute it… floppy disk, CD-ROM, and it may not have been just one, depending on your application size, it could have been multiple of them… what’s more if it was an application that was targeted at users all over the world, packaging, distribution… it was hard.
Today, we have incredible application frameworks like Electron (https://www.electronjs.org/), which helps accelerate all of the complications of developing a modern application, used by Microsoft, Slack, Facebook, and one of my all time favorite tools Obsidian (http://obsidian.md). These frameworks are helping people build applications faster than ever before, and target more platforms for people to use them on.
The other enabler that has helped drive the boom of these applications are the application marketplaces themselves. These marketplaces not only give an easy way for end users access to apps and services, it also helped categorize apps, provide feedback from other users to help influence choice, and a transactional platform for these app builders to monetize their ideas. These marketplaces are key to a platforms success, and have been a key foundation for major platforms like iOS, Windows, Android, but also for gaming companies Epic, Steam… media companies YouTube, Spotify, Netflix and others (although media companies might not be quite like an application platform, but they provide similar characterstics for content creation).
Finally, greater connectivity at higher speeds means that users were able to have accelerated satisfaction in getting access to these applications. As connectivity got faster, users could see an app, read a few reviews, gauge its rating, and download the app in minutes, if not seconds. If the app didn’t do what they wanted, or promised, then the app could be deleted, and another selected and trialed.
These factors are challenging the incumbents of the workforce today in a major way, traditional workforce applications and product suites are threatened by the niche products that target specific experiences. Note taking applications, are a great example of this… the market itself used to be dominated by companies like Microsoft, EverNote, Google, Apple etc… today those platforms are being challenged with products like Notion, Obsidian, Bear and more, who are looking at how some traditional applications have slowed, and have entered with compelling offerings showcasing accelerated innovation.
The one final piece of the puzzle that makes this boom possible is the users, and the relationship symbiotic in nature, the communities of users. Its almost symbiotic in nature, the apps generate the creation of communities to support, and the communities encourage and accelerate the development of the capabilities in the applications themselves.
The connectedness of innovator communities
The idea for communities around technology aspects is not necessarily a new thing, even I had the privilege of working with a variety of communities in my time as a developer evangelist at Microsoft, and today, I work with a community of partners, so communities aren’t new. What is new is the underlying technologies and behaviors that support communities.
YouTube created a platform for people to share their ideas and thoughts, best practices and ideas with others, Discord is enabling people to rapidly build up community infrastructure overnight to engage people, and GitHub is enabling people to come together to actively contribute to turning idea in to innovation. Technology itself is enabling innovation in technology.
In additon, the barriers for entry to these communities is clearly coming down. In the past, people were apprehensive to get involved in physical meet ups and communities, believing that they were for people who were experts, not for the general user. Today, due to the fact that people have been remote from others, and maybe due to the need for connectivity with others, people started to get involved, they started to ask questions, they found communities formed around these new applications and products that they were experimenting with, they shared their success, their frustrations, their own ideas for improvements.
These communities have empowered users to accelerate their experimentation and usage of these new tools, if something didn’t work quite right, then the community would be there to support willingly, with ideas, solutions, templates etc, and the group capabilities and confidence around that concept would drive forward.
The innovation that is generated through these communities have not just landed in the technologies and products that are used, but that innovation culture is changing up the business processes that have been in place for years in the companies the constituents of these communities exist.
The next wave of digital transformation is end user driven
The three factors explored here, the evolution of a self-supported innovation model, development of new productivity experiences, and the support of connected communities is empowering the end-user to identify things that can be improved or changed, take risks, and introduce new supporting technologies to achieve individual and business success.
This presents an incredible opportunity and risk for supporting technology departments, should they take the decision to quell this approach before it becomes mainstream (I would argue that time has already passed), or do they take the action to facilitate, guide and encourage?
As a technologist, I would support the latter of course. In looking backward, we can also look forwards, as this concept of end-users having extreme power to influence, if not change the direction of IT has happened multiple times before. Think about the impact that Excel macros have had on the migration of productivity suites in companies, the impact that iPhones have had in the enterprise to accelerate IT’s need to support the consumerization of technology.
When companies have embraced and supported these shifts, the productivity of the user community has lept forward and given the organization a competitive advantage. To do this, companies will need to look to establishing Centers or Excellence (or innovation), that not only provide access to tools and technologies to innovate, but also to guidance and support structures for how to access data, manage security etc. The concept is not to stop innovation and creativity, but to provide a safe way for the user and the company to embrace it.
End user driven digital transformation is real, and it is happening today, organizations will need to listen, engage and empower their users to drive the next competitive advantage.
