Running IT to Shape Innovative Workforce

Modern digital technologies bring unprecedented convenience for people to learn and work, improve their productivity, learning agility, and innovativeness.

We live in the knowledge economy, digital workplace encompasses so much that it's hard to isolate it from other dimensions of the enterprise. With information fluidity, knowledge abundance, and powerful technologies, the digital era upon us is the age of people, people are the focal point of any organizational design, technology application, or process optimization. IT is the linchpin of digital transformation, how to run a people-centric IT organization to shape innovative digital workforces and improve overall business performance and maturity?

Digital IT workforce management: Driven by strategic necessity, digital technologies, and cultural progress, the digital workforce today are divergent in many ways, share a natural affinity for new perspectives, innovations, and collective wisdom. Managing an innovative digital workforce is both art and science. Organizations need to pay more attention to creating shared and admirable goals and then, develop an inclusive and innovative team to compete and collaborate as they deem fit. With effective information management, collectively, they can amplify their knowledge power to solve business problems innovatively. IT is transforming and moving to reach higher maturity in the digital era, from IT workforce management perspective, IT skill gap is a reality, IT talent needs to have both technical and business skills, strong business acumen and in-depth IT understanding to frame and solve the right business problems. Otherwise, it can enlarge IT-business gaps because many IT specialists do not have the proficient business knowledge to understand what the real business problems need to be solved or what customers wanted from an outside-in perspective. Sometimes, instead of solving problems, they probably add more unnecessary complexity to the already tangled processes or products, to create new problems. To shape a highly effective workforce, workforce planning and management have to become more analytical, dynamic, and systematic. It’s important to apply workforce analysis, put the right talent in the right position with the right capabilities to solve the right problems creatively, and align the right talent to achieve business goals in a structural way.

Leverage IT to shape an innovative workforce and build a culture of innovation: Although the responsibility to maintain and grow one’s expertise has always largely fallen on the individual employee; albeit it is great when the organization provides support, and empower their staff with efficient technological tools to achieve more, align their career goal with the business goals and build the culture of learning, risk-tolerance, and experimentation, to inspire creativity and catalyze innovation. Leveraging IT to innovate the workforce is not just about playing some latest technology tools or gadgets or following the trendy practices, it has to keep the digital flow from top-down to bottom-up, streamlines information, ideas, and business flow. The IT-enabled creative workforce management helps employees at all levels within an organization understand and develop their creative capacity to solve problems and explore ample opportunities in new and innovative ways. The goal is to shape the digital workforce and workplace in the way people can relate to themselves and to their experience of their environment and others around them, create fresh ideas, unleash collective potentials, and achieve higher than expected performance results.

Effective workforce management focuses on attraction, engagement, and performance alignment: The digital workforce is a technology savvy new breed - it's the super-connected generation with a multitude of varieties. Thus, the best digital practices for workforce management include a better understanding of people through empathy, better education, and better empowerment. Because the digital environment is dynamic and uncertain, from the workforce management perspective, it’s strategic to build a learning organization in which information and technology are the backbones, people can learn and develop themselves, practice self-management and encourage mastery. The logical scenario to manage a healthy workforce is to attract the right people with a growth mindset first because the business growth and innovation today are heavily dependent on those talented people who have the right aptitude and attitude, with autonomy and changeability, bring the positive energy to the workplace, and they are comfortable to be the change agent or customer champion, etc. Secondly, it’s important to engage people with recognition and intellectual challenges. How you engage people will directly impact on how their remuneration and performance management systems reinforce the organizational strategy. When people are filled with inspiration supported by better understanding, they can better adapt to changes and reach their full potential.

Modern digital technologies bring unprecedented convenience for people to learn and work, improve their productivity, learning agility, and innovativeness. Running IT to shape an innovative workforce is to empower people with effective tools, tailor business solutions depending on the situation and advantage you want to gain, encourage creative thinking, improve employee engagement and satisfaction, and maximize the full potential of the digital business.

Posted in: IT Innovation,IT Transformation,Talent Master