The Baldrige Criteria ask how you communicate within and outside your organization and how you collect and transfer knowledge. The best answers to those questions are moving in a digital direction.

Here’s a quick quiz to determine if your organization is “switched off” for digital or “switched on,” courtesy of Jeffrey F. Rayport (“Does Your Company Need a Digital Readiness Checklist?” Harvard Business Review, February 9, 2010).

• We use a “walled garden” client like Lotus Notes for email, calendar, and contacts vs. we use an “open platform” like Outlook that facilitates easy connectivity.
• Our technology staff behaves as if we work for IT vs. our technology staff knows it works for us by enabling our productivity and output.
• Our organization’s policies block external streaming media, social networking, and some commercial sites to PCs and apps downloads to mobile devices vs. our policies embrace external media streams in all formats and from all sources.
• Our day-to-day communications rely on extended voicemail and lengthy face-to-face meetings vs. our daily communications rely on email, IM, phone, and concise face-to-face meetings.
• Internal communications are infrequent and randomly issued and take the form of “official” memos vs. frequent and regularly issued internal communications in the form of email employing rich media.
• Our intranet lacks or has limited social media features and crowd-sourcing of ideas vs. our intranet is abundant with social media features to encourage collaboration and crowd-sourcing.
• Our knowledge management system is hierarchical, top-down, and run by KM “professionals” vs. our knowledge management system is non-hierarchical, bottom-up, and managed by a lean staff.
• Our organizational meetings take place in broadcast mode as “one-to-many” communications vs. meetings that take place in dialogue mode as “many-to-many” communications.
• Our culture encourages information hoarding vs. our culture encourages information sharing.
• Our organizational politics are not transparent and are predicated on information asymmetries vs. our politics are relentlessly transparent and predicated on information symmetries.

If your organization fits the first half of more than a few of these contrasting statements, it is “switched off” for digital. The statements represent the Digital Divide and they shape how you answer key questions Rayport poses: “What impact has digital had on what you offer your customers or clients, how you interact with them, and, perhaps most critically, how you lead and manage yourselves?”

You can choose whether your organization is “switched on” or “switched off” for digital, as long as you recognize that those that are “switched on” will rule your industry—if they don’t already.

To read more about more effective communication and information management, click on these articles:

• Knowledge Management 2.0
• The Next Generation Collaborative Enterprise
• Increasing Employee Satisfaction in a Time of Decline
• Effective Employee Communication
• Baldrige for the 20-Teens

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