The cross-government Digital Workplace community welcomes anyone from across the public sector who has an interest in improving how we work in our modern digital world.
From supporting the adoption and change management of new technology to exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) and automation can assist us in the civil service, in the Government Digital Service (GDS) Digital Workplace team, we’re dedicated to ensuring that the UK public sector remains at the forefront of innovative workplace technology.
Why does the digital workplace matter?
The workplace is the engine which drives delivery. Everything from the tools you use daily to the way you collaborate with others both inside and outside of the public sector are determined by the state of our digital workplace. This is why our Digital Workplace community is so necessary – it connects peers across the various departments, agencies, and organisations that make up the wider UK government, and enables change through collaboration.
We organise frequent events on a wide variety of workplace-related topics, which always gives our community an opportunity to get involved with some exciting hands-on experiences.
Visual Collaboration Week focussed on tools which enable teams to work together through visual representation, such as virtual sticky notes, graphs, process flows and even images. The strength of these tools is in how they facilitate the effective exchange of information in simple ways that everyone can understand and take part in in real time.
Visual Collaboration Week gave civil servants a chance to explore how modern collaboration tools are evolving, and how they are being used in practice to support planning, problem-solving and delivery.
Celebrating visual collaboration
We heard from three suppliers who offered different approaches to visual collaboration, with practical demonstrations and real-world use cases for their tools.
Mural is just one example of a virtual whiteboard-type tool which is focused on facilitation and human-centred design. In this demonstration, their team focussed on showcasing how AI can support workshops by generating ideas, summarising sticky notes, clustering input by theme and tagging sentiment.
We were also able to explore the looking, understanding, and making (LUMA) methodology, which is a human-centred design framework comprising of a set of 36 collaboration techniques. This methodology enables teams to move productively from insight to action.
Miro, another virtual whiteboard tool, demonstrated some of its project management capabilities. Good project management is a key part of the digital workplace, so it was useful to have access to tables, timelines and kanban views within this online workspace.
Likewise, attendees appreciated the ability to integrate with common task management tools such as JIRA, Azure DevOps and Microsoft Planner.
Finally, Lucid introduced the Lucid Suite, which features tools for structured diagramming and collaborative idea sharing. We learned about a real-world scenario where HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) used data integration and conditional formatting to highlight pain points in user journeys.
We enjoyed being able to try out a variety of tools and learning about different collaboration techniques. Of particular interest was the ways in which AI is being used to facilitate better teamwork and to drive actions and processes.
Join the community
We’re always looking for new members in the cross-government Digital Workplace community, and encourage you to get involved if you’re interested in:
- improving digital employee experience and reducing digital friction
- enabling collaboration across boundaries
- how artificial intelligence (AI) and automation can improve how we work in the civil service
- adoption and change management to support technology
You can join the Digital Workplace community through the Microsoft Teams site or contact [email protected] for more information.
