What I’d do differently the second time
Rolling out a digital workplace is deceptively easy. You choose the tools, you deploy them, you migrate data, you train people, you declare success. On paper, everything looks clean. Adoption curves go up. Usage numbers look reassuring. And yet, a few months later, frustration creeps back in. People work around the tools. Knowledge scatters. Search disappoints. Identity issues surface at the worst possible moment.
Having done this more than once, I’ve learned that the first rollout teaches you very little. The second one teaches you almost everything. Here are ten lessons I wish I had fully absorbed the first time. Yep, getting older makes one smarter… a bit
- Adoption is not a phase, it’s the product. I used to treat adoption as something you “drive” after the rollout. That’s backwards. Adoption is the outcome you are actually building. If people don’t change how they work, nothing else matters.
- Identity is the real foundation. Before documents, chats, or apps, there is identity. Who you are, what you can access, and why. Weak identity design creates friction everywhere else, often invisibly, until it suddenly becomes very visible.
- Search is a promise you must keep. The moment you tell people everything is “in one place”, search becomes critical. If search fails, trust collapses. People stop believing the system knows anything, and they revert to old habits instantly.
- Knowledge does not manage itself. Putting content in a shared space does not make it usable. Knowledge needs ownership, curation, and lifecycle rules. Otherwise, the workplace becomes a well-organized mess.
- Change management is not (just) communication. Emails, videos, and town halls help, but they don’t change behavior. Change happens when new tools align with real work patterns, incentives, and constraints. Anything else is noise.
- Local context matters more than global elegance. A beautifully designed global solution that ignores local realities will be quietly bypassed. The goal is coherence, not uniformity. Allowing room for local adaptation increases adoption, not fragmentation.
- Governance must be visible, not heavy. Rules that are unclear create more resistance than rules that are strict. People accept constraints when they understand them and see them applied consistently.
- Migration is emotional, not technical. Documents carry history, habits, and sometimes power. Treating migration as a purely technical exercise ignores the human cost of change, and that cost always comes back later.
- Metrics should describe behavior, not traffic. Usage numbers are easy to collect and easy to misread. What matters is whether the workplace simplifies work, reduces friction, and helps people decide faster and better.
- You never really finish. A digital workplace is not a project with an end date. It is an evolving environment. The moment you stop tending it, entropy takes over.
If I had to summarize all of this in one sentence, it would be simple: rollout creates access, adoption creates value. The second time around, I would spend less energy perfecting the platform and far more time understanding how people actually work, search, decide, and collaborate. Because at scale, the digital workplace is not a toolset. It is part of the organization’s nervous system.
And nervous systems need care, not just engineering.
