What do you really need and why?
What’s your biggest problem and opportunity? What causes the most friction and wastes money? What would be incredibly useful? A game changer?
There may be a simple answer but overall ‘it depends’. It depends on your intentions (strategy and choices), the capabilities you need to meet them, the tools (and data) you need to fulfil those capabilities and how you choose to work with them (the way you work and knowing how to use your tools and data well matters a lot).
There are no silver bullets or magic wands. Just good basic tech, well managed data and content and smart processes - AI is just a tool, and a useful one, if it fulfils our capabilities in pursuit of our strategy. It looks amazing but so did email (and word processing) 32 years ago…
Sometimes the biggest ‘innovation’ we can make is just doing the basics better.
‘Digital transformation’ is just a group of necessary projects knitted together and delivered well, accompanied by behaviour change, and guided by a strategic direction. The Digital Framework maps out the main components. Behaviour (and process) change really, really matters - don’t just ‘buy things and do stuff’ then wonder why nothing really improved. It really is about you and how you work.
Defining and committing to a digital strategy helps you make consistent choices and better decisions. Clarifying your ‘must have’ capabilities (knowing your key outcomes and outputs) then mapping how you get there for each one and ironing out the pain points (a Jobs to be Done atlas and user journeys helps here) helps identify the opportunities. Then you can ensure you have the right tool (set up the right way) and right data to support you in your journey, fulfil your capabilities and meet the intentions of your strategy (organisational as well as digital).
AI can be an asset (assuming you manage for privacy, compliance and information security) – a thinking partner, a data simplifier, a note taker, a research assistant… as long as these are necessary capabilities and make the important things easier, faster and better (and stay safe, secure and compliant). Get clear what it’s for and use it well – otherwise it’s just more noise.
Having the right tools and technology, the time and space to learn to use those tools well and encouraging the behaviours and actions which underpin their effective use is fundamental but doesn’t happen often enough.
Let’s be clear what we need to use, provide the training and time and learning resources to use it well [not an ad hoc hour introduction to Sharepoint then throwing people in the deep end], in order to enable the greatest support, and let’s iron out the things that don’t work rather than putting up with inadequacies.
The right tool for the right need at the right time. The knowledge, skills, confidence and application of the learning. A bit like being a good legal advisor.
Like Lego, the journey to a great outcome becomes with a single piece.
And the spoiler for most organisations that makes all the difference - get yourself a computer that works properly, a phone that shares information with it and a decent internet connection then decide how you want to work best and then learn how to use your critical tools well. Get your foundations firmly in place and then start ‘innovating’. Because the real loss is wasted time when the basics don’t function.
