At most companies, when it comes to leveraging data to drive better business decisions, the Chief Information Officer is the one with the keys to the kingdom. But in today’s digital workplace – where employee experience matters than ever before – it’s time for CIOs to share the wealth.
As the CIO of the non-profit New York Foundling, my team works with a staff of more than 3,000 employees, spread across 200 different locations. Through our programs focused on child welfare, developmental disabilities, education and more, our employees help children, adults, and families reach their full potential. For us, data-driven technology doesn’t just help us work more efficiently; it helps us gain the insights we need to make a difference in the communities we serve.
Like many other organizations, we recently saw our hundreds of locations become thousands of individual home offices as we transitioned into remote and hybrid working. This change in our workplace necessitated an evolution in the way we use data and technology to accomplish our goals – and fortunately, this shift towards agility and analytical thinking is one we had already begun.
Here are the main lessons I’ve learned as a CIO through this period of innovation and growth, within the New York Foundling and the technology space at large.
Lowering the barrier to data accessibility
Two years prior to the pandemic, our organization underwent changes that would later enable us to adapt to the new world we’d soon find ourselves in.
As we continued to grow into more sites and add new programs, it became clear that we needed to embrace an agile mindset – and to do so, digital experience could no longer be solely a CIO-level priority; it had to become a core competency across all levels of staff. To keep up with the speed with which our organization and technology was shifting, everyone from interns on up to executives had to align with a philosophy geared towards digital management.
The question was: how do we leverage the data we have to drive service excellence? As the CIO, I could access all the data coming in from our devices and technologies, but it wasn’t accessible to everyone. Our solution: we began to invest in tools to increase data accessibility across the organization.
We quickly recognized that lowering the barrier for data accessibility streamlined many of the everyday processes we rely on. For example, we were able to integrate new hire information directly into our various platforms when an employee joined the organization – a task that once ate up a ton of a service worker’s time.
In doing so, we began to convert traditional service technicians into digital advocates who could now focus on driving innovation in the digital workplace. Eventually, we reached a point where all of our staff had access to actionable data to drive their decision-making no matter what program they were a part of.
What we learned was that with an agile mindset and an emphasis on data accessibility, employees don’t need technology degrees to be tuned in to the digital experience.
Becoming proactive in the age of remote working
Then, as we all know, the pandemic hit. We faced a new challenge: how do we help Foundling workers continue to successfully deliver services in this fractured, chaotic environment?
As was the case at most companies, we accelerated our technology adoption at an unprecedented level, deploying a host of new tools to workers at home overnight. It’s here that we were very fortunate to have already cultivated an agile, experience-driven philosophy among our staff. My team was able to adapt to these new challenges and become more proactive in managing digital experience at the most local level – as our hundreds of physical sites suddenly became over 3,000 home offices.
Our team of digital experience advocates – who once were performing standard service tasks like swapping out hard drives – are now acting as proactive analysts, monitoring experience dashboards and personas to find trends in our remote workers’ technology experiences.
This level of analysis opened the door for us to constantly engage with our staff through virtual campaigns. When an adverse event occurs or we notice something isn’t aligned, we deploy desktop alerts directly from our digital services platform to remote workers with data and recommendations to keep our programs running smoothly.
In our business, this level of ubiquitous engagement messaging was essential throughout the pandemic. As we have staff working our disability services programs moving between multiple locations, we needed to ensure that our communication followed employees wherever they go.
Nurturing the next generation of CIOs
The change the Foundling has gone through, by becoming more agile and proactively improving experience, hasn’t just been a strategic shift. It’s been a total evolution of our culture. And that means our next generation of digital advocates must subscribe to an agile philosophy – where every deployment is only an iteration, one that can be continuously improved upon to benefit employee engagement.
When we’ve hired new staff members through our internships, we’ve found some of our best performers through this program. Is this because they bring a savvy technologist’s perspective to the team?
No. It’s because they have the mindset of “I want to make a difference” – which is exactly what we’re looking for in our digital experience advocates. They’re learning new technical skills on the job, of course, but more importantly they’re thinking analytically about the impacts of end-user computing and how they can improve the experiences of their peers.
As a CIO in these changing times, I know that this combination of personal understanding and analytical skills is the true recipe for success in our industry. Our young digital advocates are agile change-makers, always looking for new ways to use technology to make a difference for human beings – in other words, they possess the qualities that will one day make them tremendous CIOs.
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