Barker Digital Common Sense

and how to get IT
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-0983-0256-6
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 126 Seiten

The internet and digital technology require us to redefine ourselves, manage ourselves, educate ourselves, upgrade ourselves, integrate ourselves and quantify ourselves in order to do well - at work and at home. But what does 'good' look like? And who shows you how to do it? Digital Common Sense answers these questions by guiding readers through a set of common-sense activities, some of which they may already be doing, but others they probably won't. The second core theme of the book focuses on the need for those who grew up before the digital age to become more 'digitally curious', and how to 'get' IT. The only way we can keep up with digital natives and learn how people are achieving new ways of working in the digital world is by asking them, so we need to develop that muscle. It's just digital common sense.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barker, Bob

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE My (self) Leadership Technology has changed so much in the workplace that unless we change too, our careers will suffer. First came the internet and networked computing, then Google searches and Amazon eCommerce; then social media, the iPhone, apps, the cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality… and that’s just the start. The workplace has been transformed since those of us over 40 entered it, and the transformations continue. Unless we upgrade ourselves and become digitally competent and confident, we’ll be left behind. We need to develop digital common sense and think about how we appear online, and change how we manage ourselves, filter information, process tasks, communicate and even quantify our health and happiness. If we don’t, we’ll go the way of the dinosaurs. If you are pre-millennial and grew up before the digital age, you are what the UK’s Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, calls “the last of the innocents” – people who grew up before the popularization of digital culture. Michael Harris in his book The End of Absence calls them “digital immigrants”, which he defines as those who have lived “both with and without the crowded connectivity of online life”. You won’t be a digital native – someone who grew up communicating using technology, so is digitally confident, which is an advantage in the world of work today. Young people coming into the job market today have had 10,000 hours of using smartphones, iPads and laptops while they were at school and college because in their modern classrooms they have used digital technology as well as pen and paper. The challenge for you is to make friends with technology to avoid being left behind and potentially unpromotable or even unemployable. If you’re slow to adopt a new collaboration platform, don’t respond on messaging platforms or use email poorly, you could be seen as someone who’s not keeping up, is ‘old school’ and possibly a barrier to speed and success. “Average is over. The key divide is between the 10% to 20% of people who can manage computers and everyone else.” Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics, George Mason University Your presence on social media is also a measure of your digital confidence. For example, if you don’t have a good profile on LinkedIn, you will be invisible in the business world. Younger people see that as a sign of your lack of interest in others and in connecting. You could be seen as unapproachable or aloof. You won’t benefit your company and you won’t have much of a presence in your industry. Microsoft’s MyAnalytics (which calls itself ‘the fitness tracker for work’) now enables individuals and companies to track people’s online behaviours: if you’re seen to be spending too much time in meetings or too long on email, that will register, and if you’re not collaborating enough or have a small internal network, that will also show. Essentially, it exposes poor digital skills. I saw what this means when I led a 21st Century Human Upgrade workshop for a group of senior managers: a quarter of the delegates were in a vulnerable position because their digital skills were poor, but they saw no need to change. Over the next two years, quite a number of them were moved out of their roles. I’ve been in the technology industry for nearly 35 years and there has never been a time when we’ve been expected to know and use so many digital skills. The technology companies are full of very clever people who are constantly developing new software shaping the way the world operates, but the problem for the rest of us is that it’s difficult to keep up. I’ve seen people’s careers stalled and cut short because they were not able or willing to keep up with the digital changes or skills required by their organization. I’ve seen others waste hours every day using email inefficiently, or struggle with software because they haven’t been shown how to use it properly. I’ve seen many people who don’t know how to use social media in a business context, so don’t use it at all. They feel it may not be appropriate for business because they don’t understand its full potential, so they’re missing out on valuable networking, seeing the competition and being seen by clients. “People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organisations aren’t keeping up.” Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management For the past five years, I’ve been teaching teams and senior management how to upgrade their digital competence, making them more curious about technology in order to build their confidence. What I saw was that organizations were very keen to buy in the latest technology and software, but were less keen to invest in the changes to support it. Their people struggled to adopt and to make use of the new systems. Somehow, they were expected to know how to apply them straight away. I also noticed that younger people were able to get to grips with this challenge but people who lacked confidence, interest or mindset were held back. Often, they wouldn’t admit they had a problem and struggled on at work unclear, unsure and too embarrassed to ask. New systems even slowed productivity because employees who had been confident with their previous way of working now were not. They could see younger colleagues working efficiently with the new technology and felt unable to admit that they were finding it difficult. Although I have spent my entire career in IT and (I admit) I love technology, I too have struggled to learn a lot of new systems as new software was suddenly brought in to companies that I worked in. It wasn’t unusual for a system that we were all comfortable with to be closed one day and a new one installed the next, forcing change with no more than a very basic introduction. People were often unable to do their jobs as they had done before and had nowhere to go to get help. Instead of the system speeding things up and improving efficiency, it did the very opposite and slowed many people down. I’ve seen this happen many times, even in large software companies: people were teaching themselves and not getting the most out of the software. They were making it up as they went along, making mistakes and figuring it out on their own. Sometimes they asked colleagues for help and, depending on how digitally confident their colleagues were, sometimes they got the help but often they didn’t. They may have gone to the IT department, but the IT people had their own work to do and often it wasn’t their responsibility – they hadn’t been involved in the training on the new software, so were completely unable to help. When I started training teams using new software, I observed a big difference in the learning styles of the younger and older people. While the younger groups would absorb the training and then discuss and apply what they’d learnt, the pre-millennials did the opposite. They would sit by themselves, feeling out of their depth, waiting to get my attention, ask questions privately or try to figure it out by themselves later – which of course often never happens. As far as the company was concerned, it had provided the training and that was that; and if one group of people was using it confidently, the training was deemed to be successful. Over time, that meant that more and more people got more and more behind, less digitally confident and less engaged. Companies often perceived this lack of engagement as a lack of motivation. Individuals felt out of step with the company and there is no doubt that their career paths were adversely affected as a result. People often colluded in their own failure, calling themselves dinosaurs and technophobes or would joke about letting the kids do it. What they didn’t realize was that they were compounding the premature end of their careers. They were drawing the attention of colleagues and managers to the fact that they could no longer do the job. They were also demonstrating that they weren’t willing to change. They couldn’t go back to the old way of working and the old system and they couldn’t work with the new system, so they had effectively created their own redundancy. Companies are losing money because people are inefficient, overloaded and overwhelmed, which ultimately leads to stress, sickness and having to take time off. But as everyone knows, replacing and recruiting new people is expensive and time-consuming. Organizations aren’t doing this on purpose. They aren’t wasting money on training and new software because they want to; they believe that the training they’re providing is professional and sufficient and that it’s down to the individual to be responsible for their own development. And it’s not unusual for a large company to spend millions on its Learning Management System, so it’s understandable that it believes it has done all it needs to do. What is needed today is an appreciation that the majority of the workers who did not grow up in the digital age need a different approach. I wrote this book to help give you a structure for what today’s essential digital common sense is and what its essential foundations are, so that you are seen to be competent and confident in today’s workplace. Otherwise, you will come across as someone who is not comfortable with the pace of change. I don’t like to see people not making the best use of...