Think for a moment of your favourite
shopping experience. Is it a traditional French market, vibrant, colourful, full of individual stalls and fresh produce? Or is it a plush mall, spacious, calm with prestige names and reliable quality? Or do you prefer the convenience of a superstore, where there is one place for everything and you can do your shopping with the minimum fuss? Now imagine what the equivalents would be for intranet and the digital workplace. The market equivalent might be an organisation that uses all the latest tools, but rather chaotic; the superstore would be a very orderly portal, optimised for efficiency.
A new report by IBF released on 2nd November 2010 and called the “Digital Workplace Maturity Model” uses this metaphor to explore how organisations can develop their working environments. Drawing on IBF’s extensive experience of evaluating intranets and portals, this is a tool to help those responsible for managing the digital workplace to understand where they are now in terms of the overall user experience and think strategically about future directions.
The model uses four dimensions, each with 5 levels of maturity:
- Communication and information
- Community and collaboration
- Services
- Structure
The reason for having four dimensions is to get away from the notion that growing maturity means all organisations have to follow the same linear path, for example getting communication right, then collaboration and only when that’s right pursuing employee services. Instead, we take a pattern-based approach , and use the metaphor of how markets have evolved to characterise them. For example:
- Retail = communication and information
- Social and community = online communities and collaboration
- Civic and private services = employee services and application
- Town\ retail planning & management = digital workplace structure, integration & governance.
As an illustration, this blog looks at two different patterns (there are 5 in the full report)
The Market Square Pattern
Traditional markets have little structure – stalls next to each other often sell unrelated things and finding your way around takes time, and offer few services beyond, perhaps, a food stall. But they can be entrepreneurial, lively and social. A digital workplace matching this pattern is most mature along the communication and information dimension (=retail) and a little developed on the community and collaboration dimension (=social and community), but not on the other two. This is a typical pattern of a basic digital workplace, where an organisation may have many small intranet sites, each run independently and most aimed at providing basic information. Site owners were typically entrepreneurs with basic knowledge of web software such as Front Page, who would usually run their site in addition to their main responsibilities. However, being small-scale, they know their users well. The market place pattern is best suited to small to medium enterprises.
The Supermarket Pattern
Supermarkets can be characterised as being very high on structure and almost entirely focused on retail. The digital workplace equivalent of a supermarket is the intranet portal: an attempt to bring all content into a single, uniform experience at a lower cost than multiple platforms. Like a supermarket, everything has its place and no duplication is permitted except by design (e.g. prominent promotions). The focus is definitely on content, but just as some supermarkets have expanded into services (e.g. pharmacies and dry cleaning), so some portals offer employee services.
Organisations focussed on efficiency and control tend to favour the supermarket pattern. However, there are downsides. Firstly, like hypermarkets, large implementations may be hard to navigate and feel overwhelming. Secondly, just as few people go to a supermarket for a good night out, workplaces using this pattern feature little in the way of collaboration or social content. Indeed, the very uniformity may inhibit the kind of innovation needed to cultivate communities and sharing.
Finding out more
As you can see, there are advantages and disadvantages to each pattern. The idea of the model is not to say that every organisation should strive for top maturity on all dimensions, but that it should decide what areas matter most given its priorities.
You can see more of these patterns in the full report available to download.
Part II of this blog post will explain more about the notion of digital workplace and how the maturity model works.
