How to Master Identity in the Collaboration Age

By Priya E. Abraham
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In a recent workshop I ran in Hamburg on this cutting-edge topic, leaders and entrepreneurs across many sectors engaged in an animated discussion on applied digital skills. Specific focus on the alignment of cyber- and physical identity, and connected opportunities, challenges and risks in the ‘people’ aspect of digital transformation and evolution, raised some key questions:

• How do you display competence safely in the cyberspace?
• To what extent is others’ perception of your cyberself differentiated across various platforms and with your physical representation?
• What happens when colleagues across three continents meet face-to-face after having collaborated solely virtually for several months?
• How is the identity of your customers reflected in your smart products?

​​Whether through collaboration platforms, social media platforms, MOOCs, wearables, augmented and virtual reality, smart homes and cars, how we work, learn, interact and live continues to change. Technology exposes us to and enables new ways of building relationships, from cautious social media experimenters to hyper-connected, insomnia-suffering addicts. However, many fluent users remain ill-equipped for the connected workplace.

​Navigating in the Collaboration Age 

Successful digital transformation requires leaders and entrepreneurs to both rework their business model and consider revising the design of their organisations, shifting from the traditional functional hierarchy to a “network of teams”, and thereby enabling highly empowered, interconnected, flexible team-working. 
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​People form the heart of organisations and should understand the value of human connections as well as their own role in the future, tech-infiltrated age. It is essential that human connections translate into collaboration in order for measurable results to be visible in organisational performance.

“For technology to work, it has to be human-centric.” 
                                                                                                     Abraham 2015:3

​Unlocking workforce collaboration skills is vital in enabling teams to bridge socio-economic, technological and cultural boundaries. Collaboration is enacted through interaction, which in turn is enacted through identity. Through raised levels of identity awareness, the workforce is able to:

• Build effective work-based relationships across generations, geographies, cultures, functional and organisational boundaries, with internal and external teams putting customers at the centre of community collaboration.
• Understand the impact of each interaction in the physical space, as opposed to cyberspace, across professional and private social platforms, ensuring  consistency or creating a different persona between the individual’s real life and cyber representation.
• Build capabilities and cyber competency that help mitigate cyber risk caused by human behaviour, reducing opportunities for cybercriminals to exploit human weaknesses thereby positively contributing to cyber security and resilience.

 
Despite the ongoing debate on the shortage of digital skills, many companies still lack a comprehensive framework for developing people’s digital capabilities. With the rise in importance of identity management as a subset of digital skills, it is critical that any company framework includes a focus on this area.

​Closing the digital skills gap

​Many previous digital frameworks are unfit for purpose today, as they are not designed for enterprises and largely fail to integrate two vital dimensions: the social and the technical competencies essential for digital literacy. The digital literacy model I propose develops digital competence within the workforce, fostering inclusive customer relationships and reducing risk.

​The digital literacy model

 Digital literacy consists of the following six components:

• Relationships communication: exploring one’s own digital life and the difference between cyber versus physical identity; participating in digital networks for learning and research or socialising.
• Digital identity and reputation: managing one’s digital reputation and online identity; managing the benefits and risks of personas and their effects on the sense of self, reputation and relationships.
• Privacy and security: strategies for managing personal online information and keeping it secure from online risks such as identity thieves.
• Information literacy: the ability to use effective search strategies and evaluation techniques, and to use information effectively.
• Creative credit and copyright: the responsibilities and rights of creators in the online space to consume, create and share information; knowledge of copyright and fair use.
• Programming literacy: the ability to write readable, maintainable, beautiful code that creates an excellent end user experience for everyone, from programmers to website visitors.

​How to master identity in the collaboration age

It is time for leaders to start redesigning organisations and devise strategies to make digital transformation happen. Digital social competence has long been overlooked in people development, specifically with a view to:

• Implementing digital strategy through regular and routine cyber interactions – building good human connections as a key to success
• Stepping up the cybersecurity agenda through responsible people behaviour – developing cyberself awareness for resilience and robustness
• Boosting innovation and customer-centricity – self-aware people behaviour extends to understanding others.

References

​Abraham, P.E. 2015. Cyberconnecting. The Three Lenses of Diversity. Surrey, UK: Gower/Ashgate
 
Amann, P.; James, J.I. 2015. Designing robustness and resilience in digital investigations. DFRWS EU 2015 – Proceedings of the Second Annual DFRWS Europe. Digital Investigation, vol. 12, suppl. 1; S111-20. Online: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S174228761500016X (accessed 3 March 2016)
 
SWGfL Digital Literacy. Cross-Curricular Categories. Online: http://www.digital-literacy.org.uk/Curriculum-Categories.aspx (accessed 5 December 2015)
JISC. Guide: Developing Digital Literacies. Online: http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/digital-literacies/ (accessed 5 December 2015)
 
Karpati, A. 2011. Digital Literacy in Education. UNESCO Policy Brief. Moscow: UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education. Online: http://iite.unesco.org/pics/publications/en/files/3214688.pdf (accessed 7 April 2016)
 
International Cyber Security Protection Alliance (ICSPA). 2013. Project 2020: Scenarios for the Future of Cybercrime – White Paper for Decision Makers. Europol European Cybercrime Centre, EC3. Online: https://www.europol.europa.eu/content/project-2020-scenarios-future-cybercrime (accessed 7 March 2014)

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