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NATO's Digital Workplace
NITECH ››› SUPPORTING NATO AND THE NATIONS
NATO’S DIGITAL
WORKPLACE
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(PHOTO NCI AGENCY)
NATO is preparing for a paradigm shift ushered in by the rapid switch in working practices brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Jean-Paul Massart, Head of the NCI Agency’s NATO Digital Workplace Programme, is managing the transition. Ann Rogers reports
When COVID-19 restrictions forced everyone to leave NATO headquarters in Brussels in March 2020, it was a problem for an organization built on political consultation. “Consultation is what brings this Alliance together,” says Jean-Paul Massart, Head of the NCI Agency’s NATO Digital Workplace Programme. “Article IV of the Washington Treaty is about Consultation and the Nations coming together, working through problems.” So the need to stay connected was urgent.
“In the beginning we were just surviving, patching things together, finding quick solutions, quick wins for everybody to be able to work from home to meet NATO’s consultative needs digitally. What surprised me were the efforts people took to solve their immediate problems with creative solutions – 75
76 the ingenuity and creativity of people and staff to just get the job done and connect with each other.”
This ingenuity came at some cost, however. While ad-hoc adaption solved the immediate problems, many of the off-the-shelf collaboration tools were not compatible with NATO’s ongoing needs and created a fragmented workplace. So, in October 2020, Massart was tasked by the NCI Agency’s General Manager to “jump ‘feet first’ into the chaos, undo the fragmentation and come up with enterprise solutions that are supported for safe and secure consultations. And then take it to the next level, that is to say digital collaboration” he explains.
The future NATO workforce will require different tools and capabilities to carry out their work
BUILDING A DIGITAL WORKPLACE
“Collaboration is a human behaviour. We know how to do this face to face, but collaborating in a digital way is different. Running
meetings is different. Writing documents together is different,” says Massart. He needed a holistic approach that addressed what he describes as “an enormous spectrum of collaboration needs – Ambassadors talking to the Secretary General; staff officers talking to each other; formal committee meetings; department heads talking to their staff; people sitting together trying to get a document written and agreed. This was harder than we thought it was going to be. It’s not just about technology; you have to make sure that the technology fits with human behaviours. Many people have never used these tools before, and some of the people that were not brought up with these kinds of tools have had to really get going and learn and appreciate what is happening here.“
Massart’s team developed a framework of use cases and set about finding out the technological, security and training requirements. “We broke the problems down
into blocks, and then tried to find solutions for each of the scenarios,” says Massart. “Industry was forward-leaning, working with us. They really rolled up their sleeves and helped us with their expertise.
“Now we are defining the new normal. Half the people are in the office and half are at home, and we have to make that work. The old ways of doing things – from providing translation services to networking around the coffee machine – must somehow take place digitally. What we’re trying to build is what I call the ‘Digital Toolbox’, because there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution.” The pandemic has accelerated a paradigm shift within NATO. Some of the changes are subtle, but important. For example, digital meetings work very differently from those that are face to face. In a physical space, status can be signalled through seating arrangements, but, on computer screens, you’re seeing something less hierarchical. In our digital world, in this mosaic of pictures, there is no seating order.
Massart anticipates that in the Digital Workplace of the not-too-distant future, these modalities will nudge NATO into a different paradigm that is more lateral and flattened, where people connect, communicate and collaborate. “The demographics are also changing. By 2025, 70% of the NATO workforce will be Millennials, so we had better adapt,” he says. “They need different capabilities, they’re accustomed to different tools, and so we need to make sure as leaders that we recognise that they’re going to be wanting different things from us to do their jobs.”
“My ambition,” says Massart, “is to truly enable a NATO Digital Workplace by adding new services and really creating a cultural shift in NATO, a digital #OneNATO, while remembering that this is about people, not just technology.”
