2021 was quite an eventful year as organizations formalized ad hoc technology, drew up long-term digital and telecommuting strategies and much more. Based on lessons learnt, future predictions and emerging best practices, what should the 2022 strategy look like?

To thrive in the future of work, digital enablement must be part of every organization’s strategy going forward.

Digital Darwinism, Digital Transformation and Digital Enablement

In the era of Digital Darwinism, organizations that hold onto traditional business models, use legacy technology and wait around are essentially on their path to extinction. Futuristic technologies such as intelligent automation, self-learning systems, big data, analytics, cloud computing and digital service delivery, among others are ushering significant efficiency, productivity gains, cost optimization and improved value. Organizations that do not adapt quickly to the accelerated pace of digital revolution will struggle to survive in the future of work. The past couple of years have especially underscored this need.

There have been close to 70% failure rate of digital transformation projects. Organizations have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars on technology that simply died on the vine. This is because they did not have the right adoption and the right culture within their organization.

Even the most powerful technology is rendered worthless if people involved do not accept and adopt it, or the right change management processes are not operating in the background. People need to understand the change, be involved in the process and be willing to adapt. This is difficult if change comes in a knee-jerk manner, that digital transformation often is.

This is where digital enablement comes in.

Why Include Digital Enablement in The Organization’s 2022 Strategy?

Adopts a People-Centric Approach

Digital enablement (DE) takes a people-centric, humane and dynamic approach to augmenting people to leverage digital technologies effectively, thus making themselves super-productive and unlocking the true potential of digital transformation at scale. It shifts away from the very narrow focus on processes and technology to focus on people, making them resilient in the VUCA world.

Eliminates the Legacy Mindset

Digital enablement helps nurture an agile, digital-first mindset and embed a culture of autonomy and innovation within the organization. This is important because a legacy mindset is a far bigger deterrent to change and transformation that legacy processes. With DE, people understand that their jobs are not in danger. They experience first-hand how technology is truly transformative and how beneficial it is to their work.

Digital Inclusion and Digital Fluency are at its Core

Digital inclusion – leaving nobody behind – is an overarching idea behind digital enablement. It equips people with the right skills and capabilities to seamlessly navigate the future of work. Skills not specific to a technology or tool but a range of digital skills that would be relevant today and in the future. These include the ability to use and train AI-powered digital assistants, building automation as a citizen developer, knowledge skills, the ability to learn and master new tools.

Digitally enabled employees understand the full picture and they do not resist change, find workarounds or wait around. Digital fluency, then, becomes even more important because in the face of changing technology/ tool/ software may change but these digital skills would help people adapt and pivot.

Enables Scaling Up of Automation at A Rapid Pace

Unlike typical technology, automation and transformation programs, Digital Enablement is not unidirectional. While the IT and technical teams may govern the initiatives, the best digital enablement platform enable low-/ no-code developers or citizen developers to automate and transform processes that do not fall within the purview of company-level solutions. So, people can automate the bulk of low-value processes, free up their bandwidth for meaningful work and help the organization scale automation at an accelerated pace, thus, building long-term competitive advantages.

Augments Human Capabilities

The best digital enablement platforms augment employees with AI- and NLP-powered, self-learning digital work assistants who function as interns and experts. As interns, digital assistants take up all those mundane, data-intensive, drudge-intensive, low-value and repetitive tasks that an employee doesn’t want to perform. As experts, they equip employees with contextual intelligence, real-time insights and recommendations, thus helping employees make better decisions and perform their job better.

Seamless and Transformative Experiences Across the Value Chain

On the experiences front, digital enablement goes beyond the narrow focus of customer experiences to look at other users – employees and partners. Customers are only the final part of the business value chain. Without happy and satisfied employees, partners and other users, achieving and sustaining superior customer experiences is highly challenging. By eliminating busywork, improving visibility, enabling faster decision-making and offering easy self-support, DE helps organizations to amplify employee and partner experiences.

Focuses on Metrics that Matter

Organizations can move away from metrics such as cost savings and FTE to look at income growth from cultural, transformational and digital talent metrics. For instance, one can define success through the number of employees certified, number of digital talent roles created, etc.

Conclusion

Digital enablement is the fuel for digital transformation and is a strong ally in ensuring transformation projects don’t fail. Technologies may offer efficiency, but it is the people who adopt these technologies to drive efficiency at work. It’s when you focus on people is when you start addressing the challenges faced in technology adoption. Digital Enablement does exactly that – enabling people to be the carriers of change across the enterprise.