On 24 September I am giving a Digital Workplace workshop for UKeiG, though non-members are most welcome to attend. This will be a ‘technology light’ workshop. I will be concentrating far more on strategy and implementation issues and tailoring the content to the participants. The format will be my usual approach to workshops. I start out asking the participants what they have come to learn and contribute and get the points written down on a flip chart. From this list I develop a workshop agenda on the fly, using some of my rather large collection of PowerPoint slides when appropriate. I’m a firm believer in user-driven workshops, not the sort of workshop where the presenter has 127 slides to get through by the end of the day and leaves 43 of them until the last hour. However I suspect that ‘collaboration’ and possibly ‘virtual working’ will be topics of interest.

Almost certainly new topics will emerge during the morning session, so after lunch I go back to the list to check off closed items and add in new ones. I aim to finish the formal (actually very informal!) session by 16.00 as many participants will be travelling some distance but I’ll then stay on to talk to whoever wants to discuss a particular topic in more depth. Every one gets a copy of the slides a couple of days after the meeting together with a list of the resources I have highlighted in the course of the day.

If you have been to one of my workshops before you know that I offer a life-time guarantee. At any time after the event participants can email me with any questions they have arising from the workshop content and I undertake to respond within two working days. My experience suggests that it is not until participants return to their organisations that they realise that they’ve not asked a particular question or have not fully understood something I was talking about. As far as I know no other workshop presenter offers this guarantee. Over the years perhaps 30 or 40 people have come back to me with queries, and several of those have turned into consulting engagements.

The overall aim is to help participants decide on what actions they should take to get their organisations to consider the benefits and challenges  of implementing a digital workplace and what actions could be taken to move from a vision to a reality. The workshop is not just for ‘large companies’. I’m just in the process of helping one of the world’s leading law firms develop a digital workplace strategy. Smaller organisations are probably in a better position to move towards a digital workplace as the inertia may be less and the benefits more tangible.

I hope this workshop description helps you to decide to come along. My search workshop on October 15 will have the same format.

Martin White