According to analyst firm Gartner, organizations that prioritize digital agility collaboration between IT and HR outperform their competitors by 147%, and deliver an average 81% increase in customer satisfaction.
That’s not all. Employees with high levels of digital agility are more than three times more likely to be successful in digital initiatives, reckons consulting firm McKinsey.
No wonder, then, that so many businesses have digital transformation projects underway, aiming to enhance their digital agility. No wonder, too, that two thirds of all business leaders believe that their organizations must actually accelerate the pace of digitalization in order to remain competitive.
The Challenge of Digital Agility Collaboration
The trouble is, organizations and their employees can’t become digitally agile by dictate.
Becoming digitally agile calls for a fundamental re-thinking both of how work is carried out, and of the technology required to best support that work.
Simply put, the day-to-day experience of work must change. Employees must become multi-system, multi-platform, able to work as effectively remotely as they will be when in the office, and able to exchange information and collaborate with others seamlessly and without boundaries.
Put another way, at the heart of a digital transformation lies a different digital employee experience—an experience that’s smoother, slicker, seamless, more connected, and more productive.
And that isn’t easily achieved. It’s no surprise, then, that studies show that around half of all digital transformation initiatives actually fail to achieve most—if not all—of their objectives.
It’s one thing to aspire to digital agility—and quite another to actually acquire it.
Joining Forces
Disentangling all this is complicated. And it’s not helped by the fact that it requires a transformation to take place at the point where two very different things intersect—technology and human beings.
The good news: according to an Economist Intelligence Unit report, high numbers of both IT and HR executives feel personally responsible for delivering improved digital employee experiences. According to a survey that it carried out, three-quarters of IT and HR executives felt such responsibility, with 74% of IT executives reporting this, and 75% of HR executives reporting it.
The trick, then, lies in getting them to collaborate together, working proactively with employees themselves, and joining forces to effect the necessary changes—technology changes, allied with changes in working practices, employee policies, and skill sets.
IT Can’t Do It On Its Own
The evidence suggests that such digital agility collaboration is very much needed.
Research carried out by global research firm Vanson Bourne found that IT functions have one view of the digital employee experience—and employees quite another.
Surveying 6,400 employees, HR professionals, and IT specialists across 19 countries, the study found that although 95% of IT decision makers thought that their IT functions provided employees with the digital tools that they needed in order to be successful in their jobs, 42% of employees—in other words, nearly half—of employees don’t agree with this.
Real Insights
The starting point: knowledge. And in particular, knowledge and insights into your employees’ existing digital agility. In other words, what is their digital employee experience like, right now?
Enter Acumen, from Scalable Software. Acumen automatically tracks the usage of your organization’s systems and technology investments, monitoring digital KPIs that map directly onto pointers to employees’ digital experience.
Acumen takes the guesswork out of figuring out how an organization’s technology investments are used, and by whom, and under what circumstances. With Acumen, you know what employees really do with the technology that they possess—and not what they say that they do.
For a real handle on digital agility, it has to be Acumen.
To learn more, download our guide, Providing an Exceptional Hybrid Working Experience, to discover how to deliver exceptional digital experiences for hybrid workers by optimizing the way your people and systems interact.
