Yesterday Jane McConnell shared a nice tidbit from her (excellent) survey of global intranet managers, that "40% of large enterprises believe in the digital workplace."

I believe this is great progress. Not just because I'm an advocate of the term "Digital Workplace" (so is Jane).

Rather, those 40% of large enterprises are recognizing what 100% of their knowledge workers already know: that there is such a thing as a Digital Workplace. Now, the employee experience within their particular digital workplace may well be fragmented, inefficient, and user-unfriendly, but that workplace exists.

To me, that's the key point. Every day your colleagues log in to various enterprise (and non-enterprise) applications to get work done. Increasingly they don't care about our labels of "Intranet," "Collaboration Zone," "ERP," and the like. Much of their day still remains spent in Outlook regardless.

Savvy enterprise digital leaders will recognize that their purview has broadened considerably. Based on the advisory calls that we get from KM and Intranet managers among our subscriber base, this can present a daunting challenge. Today they have to become proficient in the disciplines and practice of numerous different types of technologies across our vendor subway map and beyond.

But the notion of a Digital Workplace is also an opportunity for those with vision to reshape the employee experience by working from the screen backwards. This will likely require cooperation with enterprise architects, who tend to look at the challenge of a Digital Workplace from a systems-outward perspective.

Either way, the Digital Workplace simply just exists already. So the question becomes: how can you make yours more effective? Let us know if we can help you shape an answer...