Use the Engagement Initiative to Respond to Critical Changes in the Workplace

IT leaders have a significant opportunity to contribute to the business by thoughtfully embracing elements of the consumerization trend. The end result is a more flexible work environment that better accommodates a rapidly changing workplace.

Key Findings

• We are on the brink of rapid and substantial changes in the workplace, driven by numerous consumerization-related workforce trends.
• The Nexus of Forces underlying consumerization – mobility, information, cloud and social – is fueling the emerging era of the business consumer, creating an opportunity for IT leaders to have a profound business impact.
• IT leaders are in a unique position to strategically sense and respond to a collection of seemingly disconnected business initiatives for employees, partners and customers, all of which are tied to consumerization and other workplace changes.
• In the absence of a strategic response, IT leaders will be out of step with changing business needs, potentially leading to competitive disadvantage, estranged users and marginalization of the IT group.

Recommendations

• IT leaders should work to boost workplace agility through a flexible, intuitive consumerlike computing environment that emphasizes mobility, rich information access and collaboration within and beyond the firewall.
• IT leaders should start a continuing program called the Engagement Initiative that provides the framework for a strategic response to consumerization-related workplace changes.
• IT leaders must make investments in organizational change competencies, drawing from methods and practices associated with social and data sciences.
• IT leaders should assemble a portfolio of existing and new engagements skills, tools and services to better manage and amplify the strategic response to workplace changes.

Analysis

Introduction

Traditionally, IT leaders have focused on large-scale project delivery and the operational fitness of systems of record. But starting with the rise of PCs and the Internet era, users have had a greater influence on IT strategy. We are now witnessing the rise of what Gartner is calling the business consumer, which is an employee for whom business activities are part of an overall digital lifestyle. The business consumer concept assumes that individuals do not stop being consumers when they go to work. Given a choice, business consumers often make more consumerlike choices in their approach to workplace computing tools and styles to increase personal and group efficiency. Business consumers are the natural outgrowth of the consumerization trend.

At the same time, we stand on the brink of rapid and substantial changes in the workplace, including:

• A shift from routine, repeatable work patterns to nonroutine work
• A focus on creating a more engaged workforce via HR-led engagement programs
• New forms of corporate/customer interaction enabled by social networking environments
• Accelerating shadow IT investments
• Rapidly changing workforce demographics
• New ways of working, such as crowdsourcing, job sharing and microwork

The nexus forces of mobility, information, cloud and social are acting as a catalyst for consumerization and many of these workplace trends. Most IT organizations are responding to these trends in a piecemeal, project-based fashion. We believe a strategic response to consumerization and related trends is necessary. We call this response the engagement initiative.

The engagement initiative is an ongoing, deliberate approach to delivering a more consumerlike computing environment that is capable of facilitating an agile response to workplace changes. It does not specify one particular path, but advocates an approach where the business benefits of consumerization are soundly analyzed and acted upon in a strategic fashion. Some organizations will respond quickly while others will move slowly, but the point is that there is a strategy in place to guide investments.

In some cases, the HR group may be leading a program that seeks to promote employee engagement by focusing on employee-manager relationships, workplace culture, autonomous decision making, work-life balance and personal growth opportunities. This effort is synergistic with an IT-led engagement initiative because a movement toward a more consumer-friendly computing environment profits from HR-led engagement programs (for example, engaged workers are more likely to be active collaborators).

The IT-led engagement initiative buttresses HR efforts because a more consumerlike computing environment contributes to overall employee engagement by making computing resources more accessible. Therefore, the best-case scenario is when the IT and HR groups promote engagement. But the absence of an HR-led engagement program should not prevent the IT group from its own engagement initiative.

In the absence of a strategy, we believe IT leaders will be out of step with the changing business needs of employees, partners and customers, which can lead to competitive disadvantage, estranged users and marginalization of the IT group. But if the pivot toward the business consumer is done well, we believe organizations will gain substantial benefits through a more flexible partnership between the IT group and business, including:

• A more flexible, consumerlike computing environment that is more in tune with employee preferences
• An emphasis on mobility, user experience and choice, which facilitates employee autonomy
• Intuitive access to rich information stores and personal expertise, providing better returns on information assets
• A flexible, community-oriented collaboration/social networking environment that extends outside the firewall, promoting innovation and expertise sharing
• A focus on shorter and iterative development cycles and design simplicity, improving the ability to exploit accelerating business cycles

IT leaders are in a unique position to strategically sense and respond to a collection of seemingly disconnected business initiatives for employees, partners and customers, all of which are tied to consumerization and other workplace changes. The IT group, for example, has the capability to see the impact of authorized and unauthorized use of consumer applications and devices. Similarly, it has a front-seat view of social networking and other collaborative activities, and it is aware of shadow IT spending in areas such as digital marketing and sales automation. There is no other group within the organization that has such a sweeping view of activities related to the changing workplace.

Because the engagement initiative presumes greater dialogue – as well as an understanding of the needs of business consumers and business leaders – it brings IT leaders into critical C-suite discussions about:

• Business performance, since much of the engagement initiative is about exploiting emerging trends for improving business results
• Workforce management, because the engagement initiative directly impacts employee work styles
• Management styles, since engagement initiative theory promotes changes in how teams are managed
• Workplace design, since physical office layout and locations can have a large impact on how employees interact
• Customer and partner relationships, since the engagement initiative encompasses these constituencies along with business consumers
• Organizational culture, because, if done well, the engagement initiative results in a shift toward a more open, dynamic and innovative work environment

Some IT leaders have already started to strategically respond to these workplace trends. About 15% of respondents to a recent Gartner Research Circle survey reported that they have an active, CIO-led program to promote engagement, and another 11% said there is a growing interest in an engagement initiative. By 2018, we believe most organizations will be forced to employ something like an engagement initiative to coordinate a response to workplace trends. Most new organizations will employ engagement initiative concepts from the start.

Benefits to the Business

Given the complexity of work environments and the geographic distribution of expertise across enterprises, a critical competitive advantage will accrue for the enterprises that can create a socially active workforce that can tap internal and external knowledge and expertise easily. The engagement initiative provides significant advantages in how business consumers work by delivering the following:

• Increased ability to exploit new work styles, such as crowdsourcing, social networking, job sharing, swarming and microwork, across the globe
• Exploitation of the substantial, consumer-learned digital literacy of employees, partners and customers, leading to more sharing and information awareness, plus the creation of a work environment that is more conducive to a results-oriented work environment
• Increased productivity of distributed workgroups through the introduction of technology and engagement styles that facilitate interactions similar to those experienced by business consumers working in the same physical location
• Higher returns on technology investments by leveraging technology and skills across partner, employee and customer channels
• Accelerated time to productivity, better talent retention and coordinated counterpart activities in corporate merger and acquisitions (M&As)
• Better best-practice sharing, collaborative problem solving and faster project execution for sales, research, customer support and other groups
• Increased knowledge creation and reuse capabilities by finding and supporting communities of expertise inside and outside the enterprise
• Increased volume and flow of information from partners and customers inside the organization, leading to more informed product development, supply chain and customer service, for example
• More closely aligned strategies of key work teams, such as digital marketing, customer relationship, HR, and product support and development

Furthermore, societal, technology and workplace changes are resulting in a demand for new employee skill sets that will be best-served by a more consumerlike computing environment, such as social intelligence, adaptive thinking, virtual collaboration, cognitive filtering, cross-discipline competencies, quantitative analysis, cross-culture awareness and data visualization (see www.iftf.org/our-work/global-landscape/work/future-work-skills-2020).

A Focus on Consumerization

We believe IT leaders, in general, will and should start the engagement initiative with a focus on consumerization. Consumerization is the most influential of all the workplace trends, and is both a byproduct and symptom of the other trends.

The rigid distinction between customers and employees is, in some ways, a false dichotomy. Generally speaking, all customers are employees, and all employees are customers, although most employees are not necessarily customers of the company for which they work. This fundamental thought – that the distinction between customers and employees is somewhat artificial – informs the discussion around how fast and how far to adopt consumer computing trends inside the firewall.

Currently, the gap between the business computing environment and the consumer computing environment is large. Table 1 suggests some of the more profound distinctions.

Table 1. Distinctions Between Business and Consumer Computing Environments

Source: Gartner (August 2013)

This substantial gap between the business computing environment and the consumer computing environment is traditionally explained by reasons such as culture, security and compliance. Those assumptions must be reexamined. For many organizations, a partial or wholesale embrace of a consumer style of computing for business purposes will be beneficial and, in some cases, transformational. The engagement initiative helps organizations determine if and how rapidly they should embrace consumer-style computing trends.

Engagement Initiative Portfolio and Activities

Most organizations are responding to consumerization in an ad hoc fashion, with IT groups and/or business units juggling the following initiatives that are sourced internally and externally:

• Bring your own device (BYOD) programs
• Mobile application development
• User experience design methodologies, often targeting customer constituencies
• Enterprise social networks
• Customer interaction via rich social media
• Bring your own application (BYOA) programs
• Enterprise app stores
• Gamification initiatives
• DevOps development styles
• Implementation of cloud-based file synchronization and sharing repositories

The problem is that these efforts are being made tactically and in isolation, and many are customer-facing, with little impact on the partner or employee communities. We recommend that IT leaders assemble a portfolio of engagement tools and services to better manage and amplify the impact of the investments. By corralling related engagement tools and services into a common portfolio, IT leaders can more easily promote skills transfer and application reuse across the three constituencies: employees, partners and customers. Experience gained in mobile application development for employees, for example, can be applied to partner and customer communities, or skills developed in user experience design for customers can be applied to employees.

Using pace-layering concepts, the impact of the engagement initiative will mostly be on systems of differentiation and systems of innovation, although, in a few cases, organizations will apply it to systems of record. The reality is that most application portfolios do not have the architectural capability to support a more consumerlike interaction model. The starting point would be to develop an "appification" approach that would decompose systems of record to support specific user tasks, with a focus on the business consumer experience.

The engagement portfolio also assists in helping to determine the appeal of related emerging technologies, such as sentiment analysis, gamification, quantified self, semantic search, social learning, collaborative co-editing, ideation software and social analytics. One of the characteristics of consumerization is that the volume and assimilation rates of new technology are accelerating, and, consequently, organizations need to establish a deliberate approach to evaluating and exploiting relevant emerging technologies. In a similar vein, the engagement initiative can be used to exploit and guide investments in data science, particularly data about human behavior (people analytics).

The engagement initiative can also help inform decisions about provisioning models. An organization might choose a cloud model over an on-premises deployment because the cloud vendor is likely to be far more aggressive in adding mobile, social and user experience options, compared to an on-premises implementation.

Engagement Concepts Foster New Thinking

The engagement initiative also seeks to promote new approaches to routine IT actions. Table 2 includes a list of how common IT initiatives might be reframed when using the concepts of the engagement initiative

Table 2. Rethinking IT Projects With the Engagement Initiative

Source: Gartner (August 2013)

A common IT task, for example, is to upgrade the email client as part of a regular desktop refresh effort. But another way to execute that upgrade is to examine employee needs and respond accordingly. It might be determined that the sales force needs more contextual information about prospects and customers to expedite the sales process. By including the Outlook Social Connector in the Outlook 2013 deployment, salespeople can get LinkedIn or Facebook profile information embedded in each message from the customer or prospect. With the engagement initiative, the IT response to business needs moves away from the traditional to a more engaging response.

The Importance of User Experience Design

This last point in Table 2 – a tilt toward user experience design – merits further investigation. Traditional applications suffer from a serious flaw. Because they are built to accommodate a wide variety of needs, they end up promoting or deprecating some user requirements over others. A focus on user experience design – that is, taking more of an "apps" approach – corrects this one-size-fits-all mentality by focusing on a well-defined group of people and their specific goals. The app approach, therefore, increases business consumers' facility with the software.

As Gartner's Brian Prentice points out in "Maverick* Research: The Digital Designer Is the Linchpin in the Nexus of Forces," there are three intersecting types of design competencies: conceptual, technical and interaction. Traditional developers have excelled at the technical design, but user experience design puts a significant emphasis on the conceptual and interaction elements of design. Under the engagement initiative, it is likely that the IT organization will be responsible for technical design, and they will work closely with other groups that have skills, processes and cultures that enable them to excel at conceptual and interaction design.

Engagement and the Social Sciences

Responding to consumerization and other workplace trends will require that IT groups step outside their core competency of providing reliable and secure infrastructure and operations. Organizations that want to aggressively respond to workplace changes will blend social science disciplines, such as ethnography and anthropology, into IT strategies. The pivot to social sciences is predicated on IT leaders expanding their charter beyond employee productivity to include the need to foster a culture of creativity, trust, reciprocity and personal empowerment within the business.

Social science disciplines, such as psychology, sociology and ethnography, can be employed by IT leaders when determining the best way to foster collaboration between groups, for example. There are at least five styles of engagement:

• Extreme – The ability for focused groups to rapidly form and intensely apply their collective insight to resolve urgent issues, regardless of boundary constraints (such as time, place or organization)
• Engineered – The ability for different groups to exploit a methodical approach to integrated planning and decision making, from grass-roots execution to very targeted, strategic interactions
• Mass – The ability for multitudes of people to quickly and effectively contribute to the development or evolution of an idea, artifact, process, plan or action
• Contextual – The ability for people in roles to contextually connect, communicate, share and collaborate with others within an application or specific business process
• Lean – The ability for everyday groups to work together by the most efficient means already available to maximize overall productivity versus optimizing for situational needs

Understanding the goals and behavior of the actors helps match the style of engagement with the business need. In this case, having a good understanding what motivates effective collaboration (psychology), knowledge of the cultural elements of collaboration (sociology) and understanding the circumstances of the collaboration (ethnography) are likely to result in more effective business results.

Similarly, data science disciplines are likely to become a core part of the workforce optimization. A/B testing and multivariate testing can be used to create compelling user interfaces. This is critical for enhancing the employee, partner or customer experience. Analyzing interaction patterns inside and outside the firewall via social network analysis can lead to more effective collaboration across groups. Taken to its logical conclusion, the IT group may create the same type of participatory surveillance system used by consumer websites, where all actions are captured, and data science is employed to motivate and change behavior.

Barriers to the Engagement Initiative

The engagement initiative is likely to have a broad impact on business and technology strategies, and as a result, it will face significant barriers to success. Pursuing an engagement initiative will require IT leaders to:

• Step outside their traditional roles.
• Introduce more complexity and risk into the IT environment.
• Encounter inertia, doubt and even hostility within their organizations.

A strategic approach needs to include a full assessment of these potential risks and the costs of risk mitigation. Barriers to successful engagement initiative programs include the following:

• ROI – While certain elements of the engagement initiative will not require added expenditures (such as high-level strategy assessment, portfolio inventory or business unit discussion), others will require funding, such as user experience design and enterprise app store creation. Supplying a rigid ROI calculation for engagement initiative activity will be difficult at best because the benefits are largely intangible. Instead, wholesale funding of the engagement initiative will require that top management supports its core tenets.
• Prioritization – While the engagement initiative might find appeal in some organizations, the reality is that the IT group may not have any cycles to devote to it. Priorities – moving workloads to the cloud, delivering a new customer-facing website and performing a desktop refresh, for example – can leave little time for focusing on higher-level and less tangible projects, such as the engagement initiative. C-suite support is required to move the engagement initiative up the priority hierarchy.
• Change in mindset – Asking IT leaders to shift from a focus on secure and stable infrastructure and operations to a more esoteric idea of workforce optimization requires a substantial change in mindset. It is acknowledged that this is a difficult transition at best, and is unlikely to occur in the majority of cases. The CIO's belief in the benefit of the engagement initiative is the starting point for changing the IT group mindset.
• Lack of HR-IT affinity – It is not usual to find that the HR and IT groups have little affinity for each other. Because the engagement initiative requires IT-HR group dialogue on topics such as demographic shifts, the changing nature of work and business-led engagement initiatives, a contentious relationship between the groups can jettison progress. Regular discussions between IT and HR leadership teams, with no required deliverable, are needed to start creating more affinity and understanding.
• Risk – Taken to its logical end, the engagement initiative results in a more open, social and consumerlike IT environment, where more choice and control are given to the business consumer. These characteristics – open, social and choice – increase risk from a security and control perspective, and, in some cases, desire for security and control will thwart the uptake of the engagement initiative.
• IT as change agent – In some organizations, the IT group is viewed as conservative and insular, and has little credibility and mandate to promote workplace change. Lack of faith and support within business units will work against well-intentioned engagement initiatives, and success will require the IT group to gain more credibility with the business. The IT group must proactively become more engaged with the business to gain the needed credibility to execute the engagement initiative.

Each organization will have a different propensity for engagement. Figure 1 suggests some basic organizational characteristics that guide the inclination.

Figure 1. The Engagement Spectrum

Source: Gartner (August 2013)

Engagement Initiative First Steps

The initial step in an engagement initiative – discovery – is focused on understanding how workplace trends, starting with consumerization, are currently impacting the organization and how they will impact the business over the next several years. This investigation will require cross-organizational dialogue to identify pain points experienced by executive management, HR, finance, strategic partners and customers, as well as line-of-business managers and employees.

The next step – assessment – is to determine what the IT response has been so far to the workplace trends. Responses typically start with BYOD or BYOA programs and the establishment of governing policies. Similarly, an inventory of shadow IT projects related to engagement must be identified.

The third step – planning – is to develop a plan to proactively respond to the workplace trends over the next several years with a portfolio of policies, skills, tools and services. The critical element is not necessarily how IT leaders will respond, but that there is a program in place to strategically and consistently respond to these changing workplace dynamics.

One of the key barriers to strategy execution is that there is typically no IT job role dedicated to facilitating workplace change. Where programs are in place, they are typically led by the CIO or innovation teams. But we believe that the importance of responding to workplace changes will ultimately lead to dedicated roles to assist in planning and execution by working with a project and portfolio management (PPM) organization. The Gartner research team will provide specific guidance on establishing, staffing and executing the engagement initiative over the 12 months.

Figure 2 suggests one way to run an engagement initiative. In this case, there is regular dialogue between the IT group and business leaders about workforce/workplace issues and trends. This dialogue could be codified into a center of excellence. This leads to the creation of a portfolio of engagement skills, services and tools, which is employed in a variety of initiatives across teams such as digital marketing, supply chain and sales. In many cases, the portfolio includes services provided by outside design firms. When unique approaches are required, those new tools and skills become part of the engagement portfolio. Over time, using the idea of engagement styles, patterns emerge, which expedite resolution and provide greater ROI on existing investments.

Figure 2. Mature Engagement Initiative Program

Source: Gartner (August 2013)

The portfolio is managed on an ongoing basis by a PPM team, which has, as part of its charter, the ability to source skills, services and applications (including consumer applications) internally and externally. The PPM team also works to continuously adjust and integrate services, often working closely with the application development team. Some initiatives, of course, such as an app store, will be applicable to the entire organization. A major responsibility of the PPM team is to facilitate change management throughout the organization.

Benefits for IT Leaders

IT leaders are in an excellent position to help lead the response to changing workplace trends because of their ability to see activities across all areas of the organization, extending to the partner and customer communities. The potential returns to the IT leaders that execute the engagement initiative are significant. Properly done, it brings IT leaders closer to the long-sought-after goal of becoming a trusted business advisor.

The engagement initiative does the following:

• Provides a common framework for addressing diverse, but overlapping, workplace trends and a common framework for managing diverse, but overlapping, IT initiatives related to those trends.
• Packages IT concerns and goals in a more business-friendly fashion, making it easier to promote dialogue with business leaders.
• Delivers greater ROI from existing and new IT investments by increasing utilization rates, and leveraging tools and services across partner, employee and customer constituencies.
• Enables IT leaders to focus on delivering more value to the business at a time when many commodity workloads are shifting to the cloud.
• Creates significant opportunities for IT to contribute to partner and customer initiatives.
• Fosters new dialogue with C-suite executives, and creates partnership opportunities with the HR department.

Conclusion

It seems inevitable that organizations will have to accommodate consumerization trends, and respond to broad changes in the workforce and workplace. For some organizations, this accommodation may not take place for a decade, and, for others, the accommodation has already taken place. Most organizations, however, are somewhere between these two extremes.

At a minimum, it is incumbent that the IT organizations, working with business leaders, identify workplace changes that will impact the business and determine if a response is warranted. The worst-case scenario – and, unfortunately, the most common one – is that the IT group is either ignoring these important workplace changes or responding in a piecemeal fashion. The need is for a thoughtful strategic response, which is what the engagement initiative is designed to provide.

Source: Gartner Research, G00250698, Matt Cain, Mike Gotta, 21 August 2013