With all the attention to enhancing the skills of workers to cope with work automation, CEO affiliate Dr. Benjamin Schneider, and Dr. John Boudreau realized that organizations are overlooking pivotal elements to work automation success.
Research and Insights Archive
Research and Insights from the Center for Effective Organizations
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Digital Work Transformation
Click here for a PDF of the slides Everyone is talking about how AI, machine learning and digital technologies are transforming business and the nature of work. Yet there is little clarity around how to make sense of the difference between digital product transformation versus digital work transformation, and the implications for what capabilities the […]
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Designing a Digitally Enabled Prototype—Jointly-optimized Social and Technical Work System
A core concern of the STARLab work has been the “technological lead, social lag” problem. Technological advance is hurtling forward; our social technologies have not kept up. New work systems are being configured around a network of digital platforms into which are built algorithms and routines for coordination, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and advanced analytic capabilities. They provide much integration and guide decision making, as well as enable efficient execution. Organizations are proceeding with the adoption of these systems because the technology exists and because they fear that not doing so will disadvantage them competitively. There is inadequate concern for creating the optimal combination of social/human and technological factors.
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Designing a Digitally Enabled Prototype— The “Changing Face” of Innovation Design
Digitalization both demands and provides a medium for different kinds of innovation. An innovation capability will no longer be an option in the future, and it will likely look very different. The “changing face of innovation” will be driven by new technologies that enable orchestrated approaches, often among an ecosystem of partners, to develop process and product innovation, organizational/managerial innovation, and business model/ecosystem innovation. An innovation capability needs to address incremental product and service extensions, changes in the business (i.e., how value is created and delivered) and revenue model, work system innovations to support new business models, and enable greater connectivity, learning and resource efficiency across boundaries.
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Designing from the Future: Building Prototypes for Digitalized Organizations
The STARLab (Socio-Technical Action Research Laboratory) addresses the gap between the rapid advances in digital technology and the slower evolution of the social systems that are being impacted. Technology advances carry the potential to fundamentally change the nature of work, of the employment relationship, of organizations, and of societies. STARLab’s goal is to accelerate the generation of knowledge about how to design socio-technically integrated organizations to simultaneously address economic and human needs.
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Designing a Digitally Enabled Prototype— a Customer-Centric Design
In the past, growth in the population, markets, customer segments, and customer preferences as well as relatively linear technological advancement meant that a product-centric organization could be successful. Digital technologies allow us to quickly generate insights into customer/consumer behavior, expectations, and valued outcomes, and to build the customer facing part of the organization quite differently than we have in the past.
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Digital Organization Design Challenges: Prototype Solutions and Integration
This document summarizes eight specific organization design challenges facing companies attempting a digital transformation, and describes prototype solutions and responses to seven3 of these challenges. It also presents an integrated reflection on these solutions and an induced design scenario.
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Digital Socio-Technical Design
What you will learn
• Basic concepts of high performance organizations
• Examples that demonstrate STS principles, methods, and concepts
• Digital STS design methodology, tools and techniques
• Tools and formats for data collection
• What others are doing and learning from designing digital work systems
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Efficiency-Innovation Tools
This challenge has to do with using digital technology to enhance organizational ambidexterity
Companies reported that designing and balancing efficiency and digital innovation is hard and fraught with tensions and conflicts. The two types of work produce radically different structures, designs and cultures, which are often contradictory in purpose and management.
These tools are intended to help raise awareness of the challenge and to provide useful guides to actions
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Scaling Tools
This challenge has to do with spreading worthwhile digital innovations across the enterprise
Organizations are struggling to conduct four types of scaling activity: (1) rolling out optimized processes to the larger organization; (2) growing a start-up business to a full standalone P&L; (3) scaling agile units; and, (4) pushing a capability out to the value chain
These tools are intended to help raise awareness of the challenge and to provide useful guides to actions you can take to scale innovations
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STARLab Digital Transformation Challenge Toolkit
This toolkit was created for your use in helping your organization through digital transformation
It is based on the work of the STARLab, which brought companies together to discuss common challenges in digital transformation and prototype solutions, including organization redesign
The toolkit was created by members of the STARLab team based on the thinking of the participants and their own experience with digital transformation and digital sociotechnical redesign
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Integration-Coordination Tools
This challenge has to do with aligning parts and units of the organization around a common digital transformation roadmap that addresses local and global digital investments
Leaders need to provide clear direction regarding what should be decided globally and what should be decided locally
These tools are intended to help raise awareness of the challenge and to provide useful guides to actions you can take to design a more coordinated approach to digital transformation
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