New Enterprise Stack – Part 3 – Micro Experiences

Recap from New Enterprise Stack – Part 2

In Part 2 of the series, I presented a visual representation of the new enterprise stack and its facets. In Part 1, the old enterprise stack and its relevance to employee productivity, engagement and culture reinforcement are discussed.

Part 3 of the series will explore the System of Micro Experiences and its facets in greater detail with examples.

What are Micro Experiences?

Conventionally, enterprises implement a system or a tool around a work process. For example, a system for employee onboarding. Typically these systems are designed for power users or admins and focus on input of many data fields, workflows or approvals, configurations, dashboards, and downloadable reports. The various elements of such a system or tool can be categorized into 4 major components:

1. Core day-to-day experiences
2. Configuration – rules, workflows
3. Management – process adherence, exception handling
4. Governance – analytics, dashboards, downloadable reports.

In Part 2 we explored the facets of a System of Record (SOR) and a System of Engagement (SOE). Armed with the understanding of SOR, SOE and their facets, we can argue that a conventional tool or a system around a work process combines elements of both SOE and SOR albeit with a dominant focus on SOR.

A micro experience shifts the paradigm from “power user centric model” to “normal user centric model” by delivering the “core day-to-day experiences” to the normal users within an SOE thus removing the need to traverse multiple underlying tools for getting the day-to-day work done.

A micro experience centric model delinks the SOR facets i.e. configuration, management and governance elements of a work process from an SOE.

Illustrative Example of a Micro Experience

Let us examine further, the concept of micro experience with an example. An enterprise ABC Inc. intends to reimagine its employee onboarding work process and wishes to deliver the core experience on its SOE without implementing another off-the-shelf tool. ABC Inc. has ~5000 employees and its current stack includes.

1. SOR – Workday (HRMS)
2. SOE – Workplace from Facebook

Reimagining the employee onboarding work process, an illustrative list of digital micro experiences for normal users include:

• Welcome message from HR
• Introduction to team members
• Schedule 1:1 meeting with manager
• Schedule a task (for the IT team) to setup laptop with relevant access
• Nano learning courses for company values, culture, policies etc.
• Assessment for the above learning courses
• 30d, 60d, 90d engagement check-ins through pulse surveys
• Appreciative and developmental feedback from team members
• …………… and more

Hire to Retire Cycle – Micro Experiences

We can visualize the micro experiences for a normal user across the hire-to-retire cycle.

In the next series of the New Enterprise Stack, I will discuss the design principles for micro experiences and how nudges and AI/ML play an important part in designing and delivering the micro experiences. Enjoy reading part 3 of this series. Refer here for Part 1 and Part 2. Please share your feedback.