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Report

Workforce Transformation

Reimagining Work for Digital Business Agility

By Michael R. Wade, Jeff Loucks, Andy Noronha and James Macaulay

28 pages

May 2016

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Digital Business Agility

Workforce Transformation depends on Digital Business Agility, a meta-capability describing an organization’s capacity to understand and react to digital threats and opportunities. DBA has three main pillars: Hyperawareness, informed decision-making, and fast execution. These pillars are not technologies though, but technology-enabled capabilities. Moreover, while they can be understood as discrete, they actually form a complex, interacting foundation for the entire enterprise.

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In respect of workforce transformation we can see them as follows:

Hyperawareness – surfacing employee insights, sensing what is going on throughout the enterprise, among competitors, and in the marketplace. For example, Humanyze, a workplace solutions provider, supplies ‘work-pattern sensing’ tools to capture work and communications data through ‘smart’ badges.

Informed decision-making applies data and analytics to empower the workforce resulting in better decisions at every level of the organization. Logistics company UPS, for example, uses a ‘ubiquitous analytics’ tool, which gives employees continuous, real-time access to analytics in and out of the office, while collaborative platforms like Ranktab support ‘collective decision-making’ in organizations through group polling.

Fast execution manages talent efficiently by responding rapidly to informed decisions. At Cisco ‘Team Space’ is an ‘Intelligent talent allocation’ platform which gathers information on employees with insights used to build the most effective team for a given task. And Glassbreakers, Jopwell, and WayUp provide ‘agile talent pipeline’ tools with focused marketplaces that give employers access to a diverse pool of talent.

Workforce transformation video

Winning in the Digital Vortex is not just about algorithms, architectures or innovative business models, it requires organizational change and workforce transformation. And successful transformation is enabled by a company’s digital business agility, building on the fact that people are an organization’s most important asset.

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NTT Corporation, Japan’s information and communication technologies (ICT) leader since 1953, was the first to commercialize internet usage on mobile phones in the 1990s, which resulted in NTT achieving much success in Japan. However, by the end of the 2000s, Japan faced challenges with an aging population and a stagnant economy. Recognizing disruption in the ICT sector, CEO Satoshi Miura understood the need for the dominant players in the ICT industry to integrate emerging business domains beyond their existing frameworks. To secure leading global positions in ICT and the new paradigm of cloud computing, Miura needed to make strategic choices to revive growth. Case A provides information on NTT, its rivals, the global market and cloud computing disruptions. The case ends with NTT’s CEO exploring strategic growth options to prepare NTT for the future.

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Organization Nippon Telegraph and Telephone

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