Deloitte’s Think. Share. Do. does not start with a technology pitch. It starts with a definition broad enough to include almost anything: the digital workplace, it says, is essentially every technology people use to get their work done, whether already deployed across the business or still waiting to be rolled out. That framing matters, because the paper’s actual argument is narrower and more useful than the definition suggests. Most organizations, it claims, already own the pieces of a digital workplace. What they lack is the connective work.
Three trends behind the pitch
The paper names three forces it says are pushing organizations toward a deliberate digital-workplace strategy. The first is changing workforce demographics, framed specifically around the risk of losing institutional knowledge as experienced employees retire or move on faster than that knowledge gets captured. The second is information overload, arriving, the paper notes pointedly, despite the proliferation of tools meant to manage information, or perhaps because of it. The third is a rising demand for speed and better collaboration, as teams increasingly work across locations and time zones rather than a single office floor.
A framework with four layers
Out of those three trends, Deloitte builds a structure it calls the Digital Framework, organized into four layers. Technology sits at the base: the actual digital toolbox, the software and hardware an organization has already assembled, whether deliberately or by accretion. Control sits above it: governance, risk and compliance, the rules that keep the toolbox from becoming a liability. Use sits above that: the collaboration, communication and connection people actually experience in their daily work. Business drivers sit at the top: the measurable value the entire stack is ultimately meant to produce, tracked through things like productivity, staff retention and speed to market.
| Layer | Position | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Business drivers | Top | Measurable value: productivity, retention, speed |
| Use | Third | Day-to-day collaboration, communication, connection |
| Control | Second | Governance, risk and compliance |
| Technology | Base | The actual toolbox already assembled |
The layered structure is deliberately not a build-from-zero model. Its logic only works if an organization already has raw technology sitting somewhere in the business; the framework’s job is to route that existing technology up through governance and daily use to a measurable business outcome, rather than to specify what new technology to buy. Read that way, the base of the pyramid is the least interesting layer, not the most. Most digital-workplace pitches from this era led with new tools to buy. This one leads with the layers built on top of tools an organization already owns, which is a genuinely different sales pitch, and possibly why the framework survived long enough to still be live on Deloitte’s site well over a decade later.
Five practices, working “As One”
Deloitte describes its own delivery model for this framework as multidisciplinary, naming five practice areas that work together: Strategy and Operations, Technology, Human Capital, Enterprise Risk, and Tax. Four of those are unsurprising for a workplace-technology engagement. The fifth is not. Tax rarely shows up on a list of digital-workplace disciplines, and its inclusion is a small, telling detail about how broadly Deloitte was positioning this offering, reaching past the usual IT-and-HR boundary of workplace technology work into areas a client might not expect a collaboration pitch to touch at all.
It is worth asking why a tax practice would sit inside a digital-workplace pitch at all. The likeliest explanation is not that tax specialists were configuring collaboration software, but that a genuine digital-workplace overhaul touches payroll systems, cross-border employment structures and the tax treatment of remote and hybrid work arrangements, all of which shift when a company changes where and how its people actually work. Naming Tax as a delivery partner, rather than leaving it implicit, is itself a claim about how far-reaching this kind of project was meant to be.
A framework that never stopped being current
What separates this document from most consulting white papers of its era is that it never really became a historical artifact. A page carrying the exact same title and the exact same tagline, “Think. Share. Do. Transform your employee experience”, is live on Deloitte’s own site today, under Deloitte Belgium’s industry pages. That is not a byte-for-byte guarantee the current page matches whatever PDF originally circulated around 2011; Deloitte has clearly kept the framework updated rather than frozen. If you are citing this framework now, the honest description is Deloitte’s ongoing, maintained position on the digital workplace, not a fixed 2011 snapshot.
Deloitte has since published more specific follow-on material under related titles, “The modern digital workplace” and “Reimagining Digital Workplace Productivity” among them. Both read as the newer, more detailed descendants of this framework, and this paper as its origin point rather than its final word.
There is a reasonable question worth asking about a framework this durable: is it still doing real analytical work, or has it become closer to a brand asset Deloitte keeps because clients recognize it? The paper itself offers no evidence either way. What can be said is narrower and more defensible: the four-layer structure has outlived at least one full technology cycle, from on-premises collaboration software through cloud-based suites to AI-assisted tools, without needing to be renamed or restructured, which is a genuinely unusual property for a piece of consulting shorthand from 2011.