One of my key themes is called Re-Imagine Effective Work to Transform Possibilities to Realities, which I describe this way:

Taking a wide view of the business world reveals many challengers to current industry business models, often fuelled by new technological innovations that are creatively applied to overturn entrenched players. Applying the re-imagining discipline allows organisations to re-think work practices, organisational structures, corporate culture, and even their business model. This discipline is the necessary antidote to staying stuck in outdated approaches, with the attendant costs of reduced market share, decreased competitiveness, and business failure.

What I call “re-imagining effective work” other people call “digital transformation” or even “creative destruction.” Since my mindset and view of the world is more fuelled by creative opportunities that leverage the new to improve the current, I definitely prefer the positive proactive re-imagining label over the creative destruction one, and while the term digital transformation is a correct application of new generation digital tools to drive transformation, I prefer the emphasis in the label on the world of work not the enablers thereof. Regardless of your phrase of choice, all three are focused on essentially the same reality: how do we see beyond the immediate effects of new tools and approaches on work practice and envision a different way of designing organisations.

For example, as I do in Re-Imagining Productive Work with Office 365 (or alternatively Doing Business with IBM Connections if that’s your current tool of choice), you can very quickly look through the capabilities in Office 365 and see how work practice can be improved:
– for co-authoring documents, use real-time typing in Microsoft Word for letter-by-letter co-authoring, or near-real-time sharing of text in Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for a similar effect. No more email and attachments.
– for managing meetings, use a OneNote notebook plus Skype for Business to plan and hold better meetings. If you have a large screen Surface Hub available, use that too when you are actually meeting.
– for holding discussions, use a Yammer Group for team or project discussions around a common theme. This makes the discussions accessible for future reference, rather than being locked in email.

Those improvements are real and tangible, and can add a variety of performance improvements to how work gets done … today. Re-imagining effective work / digital transformation, however, calls for looking beyond the immediate impacts of today.

More to come …