technology

“Digital Irrelevancy is Canada’s Biggest Threat”

Culture has become globalized – anywhere in the world one can receive information instantaneously from common sources such as Google and Wikipedia. This can present a problem because region-specific information and history can be overlooked by these global websites. Brian Dawson suggests that this is particularly true with Canadian history – if Canadians are not active digitally and on the web, then who will tell our stories?

Canadian Science and Technology Museums want to tell the story of science and technology in Canada and they have begun to offer a variety of digital opportunities to open up this public dialogue.

Examples of this are:

The creation of educational video games like Ace Academy, where the player goes to flight school and experiences a series of first world war missions

Digitization of their collection and giving the public open access to the data.

This free reign on information definitely carries a risk, but Dawson indicates that maintaining their collections relevancy in a digital landscape required a structure where enthusiasts can easily use the collections data in their personal projects. This collaboration with the public also includes crowdsourcing – asking the public to share their individual stories through text and videos, as well as encouraging social media contribution through hashtags.

Driving these initiatives, Canada Science and Technology Museums have formed Innovation Teams comprised of a wide range of experts specializing in areas relevant to a given project. Teams work in four week cycles, during which they assess and integrate both user and stakeholder feedback. This process ensures that their projects are up-to-date and that the museums remain relevant in this digital age.

The Canada Science and Technology Museums took some negative media attention and used it as an opportunity to self-evaluate and initiate positive, digital development throughout the entire organization.

Originally published on the Digital Strategy Conference blog; republished with permission from dStrategy Media.

The second dimension of digital maturity is Technology Resources. It is one of Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity™ assessed in the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model™, a business planning tool to help organizations improve their digital processes against an established standard.

Which technologies are in your technology toolbox today?

Technology Resources icon from the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model How has your organization addressed the availability and investment in the technology necessary for implementing your digital initiatives?

What types of digital initiatives are underway?

Are you publishing web content? Social media content? Email content?

If you are publishing digital content, are you managing your website internally or does your agency? Are you (or they) managing those efforts via content management systems?

As data is one of the outputs of web, email and social content management systems, are you using any kind of analytics tools to help generate insight in how those efforts are performing?

Are any of your people trying out any tools that let them collaborate more easily? Perhaps Google Drive or Dropbox to share files with your agencies? Perhaps Skype to avoid expensive long distance phone bills?

What kinds of rules and processes or governance do you have for the use of all of these digital technologies?

Answering these questions is will help your organization determine if it is in the best position to implement your digital initiatives. What do you think? Have you got the right technologies in place to ensure your organization’s digital success?

Next: Data Strategy

Next, let’s take a look at the third dimension, your organization’s data strategy.

Participate in the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey

For specific questions that measure the human resources dimension of digital maturity, take the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey. We will share our collective results at the next Digital Strategy Conference.

Learn how to measure your organization’s digital maturity

Or, to measure your organization’s digital maturity across all six dimensions, register for our upcoming Mapping Digital Maturity Workshop, a practical, hands-on learning session to help your organization create a road map for digital success.