Catching the innovation wave: Two areas of digital strategy that your business should master

“Work-from-home facilitator”, “algorithm bias auditor” and “cyber calamity forecaster” are just three of the many future tech jobs named in Cognizant’s report on jobs of the future. These job titles highlight the new realities that digital transformation has brought about as the technology we use continues to advance our way of working.

To stay ahead of the curve, it’s crucial to adjust our skills and tools in the workplace. This includes improving our communication with hybrid and remote teams and employing a tech stack that propels progression and innovation, empowering us to think bigger. By implementing these changes, we can build up our resilience and adaptability in the face of industry developments. 

So, here are two areas of digital strategy that businesses need to refine in order to keep up.

Increasing automation for better asynchronous communication

Workplace automation is rapidly evolving, and some of the simplest features can make the biggest impact. One of automation’s most attractive features is how it reduces mundane admin or tedious actions that take time away from our actual core work. Many of us know this as  “work about work”. 

In asynchronous comms, organising the way we communicate is only more essential. Mix-ups with where and when messages were sent and missing notifications due to an overwhelming inbox can become commonplace without a strategy to stay on top of it. 

For example, you might find yourself sharing a piece of work with a colleague in another country to review. Still, the differences in time zone mean that your colleague may already have tons of other messages at the top of their inbox by the time they log on - meaning your message gets lost. And so, begins the tiring chase of “have you seen this”. With automation, you can ask your software to do the poking for you. 

This shift to enabling software to work with you on these things can enhance the way we align with our teams on tasks - whether they are four time zones or four chairs away from us in the office. 

These features help us stay on top of project milestones so that we can make informed decisions more quickly. It also gives us space for less stressful collaboration, creativity, and mentorship - and more empowered teams.

Ultimately, automation is all about cutting out those frustrating little things and clunky processes that get in the way of seamless workflows. With the right implementation, it is a powerful solution to eliminate tedious tasks and streamline workflows, leading to increased productivity and better results.

Reviewing your tech stack thoughtfully  

With so many different departments across businesses - from HR to marketing - many of us get used to working in our own way that is specific to our team. Whether that means they love digital mood boards, hate email, or even would brag to friends about their favourite analytics software. 

This can lead to a feeling of “too many cooks in the kitchen” when it comes to businesses deciding how to cut down their tech stack to be more efficient and cost-effective. While each department has unique ways of working, finding common ground when streamlining the company's tech stack is essential. So, what is the big deal? 

The presence of so many applications across the business is detrimental in multiple ways. For one, it means more pressure on the team which needs to know how to use multiple different tools. Managers and business leaders also need to ensure enough mechanisms to maintain the upkeep of the software over time. 

An unwieldy and complex tech stack also means that you might be wasting much-needed tech budgets on an unregulated system of shadow IT that leads to multiple paid solutions that do the same thing or aren’t even used anymore.

When looking to refine their tech stack, businesses need to check in with their employees to find out how they use digital solutions in the company, what they use if for and what they would change. After that, you can understand how you can better select technology that can do more and integrate better across the business with other software. 

By getting this feedback from teams about how they use their company’s tech stack, leaders can proactively address resistance to change and foster a culture of innovation. As leaders, we must show that our team’s opinions about how they work and what works for them are taken into consideration. 

In today’s economy, finding better approaches to boosting collaboration and communication will help employees be more productive and businesses be more profitable. If leaders can focus on these two aspects of their digital strategy, they are one step closer to creating a business that empowers its people to achieve greater success.