Concentrated experience, digital collaboration: Bitkom publishes a digital office guide

Concentrated experience, digital collaboration: Bitkom publishes a digital office guide.

Describing the digital office from the cloud in a user-oriented way, while presenting best practice examples is no mean feat. But for a powerful team of authors such as those at the largest German digital association, Bitkom, who recently published a guide it’s almost a breeze. The result is a beautifully illustrated overview of an important aspect of modern work that’s well-worth a read.

“We’re writing a guide to the digital office from the cloud—would you like to be part of it?” This was the question Nils Britze, Head of Digital Business Processes at Bitkom put to our Head of Marketing, my colleague, Markus Kick. He didn’t have to think for long! When the largest digital association calls, we’re in!

This is one topic that I deal with virtually on a daily basis with customers. When we talk about current challenges, they always mention that their business processes no longer match their current platforms. They tell me that their current processes take so much time before they can send quotes, bring new products onto the market, or effectively onboard new members of staff.

We then analyse their current situation together—investigating far more than their IT set up and going into their organisation, stakeholders and process agents, process steps, and much more. Only then do we bring technology into the picture, and we—me and our IT business architectures—draw up a plan together with the customer of how to streamline and optimise their processes and working methods, and—where needed and possible—to fully digitalise them.

Enough reasons to join forces with the team of authors for the Bitkom project and contribute practical experiences.

Company-wide collaboration.

We joined the team in September 2021 and things were full steam ahead. First we discussed what to include in our article with Project Lead Nils. That was the first great experience. We openly discussed what our point of view could bring to the table. Once we had the main structural elements defined, I mainly worked as an editor, following up on how the chapters were progressing, giving my opinions, all of which we discussed and evaluated as a team.

These frank exchanges were the underlying feature of how we worked—and yet the whole team was never on-site at the same time. Whenever we could, we spent most of the time working online , and in real time together on a document that allowed that kind of collaboration to develop the guide. Interestingly, we’ve also directly thoroughly tested the essence of digital offices—and I can say it works, really well! To unite so many authors on one project would be unimaginable with traditional solutions that hardly touch on the digital.

My take away.

In a collaborative team effort, a practice-oriented guide was created that presents application scenarios in the areas of customer relationship management (CRM), resource planning (ERP) and document and workflow management (ECM), as well as defining requirements for the solutions and providing an outlook. A useful quick guide for companies—and a great experience for us to be involved in.