Saturday, February 17, 2018

The Strong Pillars of the Digital Organization

Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem.

Digital transformation is a long journey with many bumps and curves on the way. The digital transformation means that companies need to infuse digital into every aspect of the business, expand to every dimension of the organization, shape the enterprise-wide digital capabilities and orchestrate a hyper-connected ecosystem which is interwoven with people, process, and technology, and form all important pillars to build a high-performance and high-mature digital organization.

The Digital Thinking Pillar: To bring in the radical change, there needs to be a paradigm shift - a mind shift. Running an advanced digital organization starts with a set of ultra-modern digital thinking, such as real critical thinking, creative thinking, systems thinking, or hybrid thinking, etc. To expedite digitalization, it’s important to leverage growth mindset -either individually or collectively, believe people can continue to learn and develop their abilities for adapting to changes. Developing ultra-modern thinking is very hard work and does include a lot of deep thinking, observation, intellectual inquiries, unusual connections, adventurous experimenting, unique skill sharpening, and differentiated capabilities building. Digitalization is the evolutionary change, keep practicing progressive thinking in a collective setting which can sustain a balance of diversified viewpoints, forward-thinking perspective, empathetic understanding, and collective creativity. To run a high-intelligent digital organization which evolves rapid changes, it requires that we move from mindset to mind flow; from fixed mind to growth mind, from thinking convenience and conventionally to thinking consequence, thinking forward and longer-term.

The innovation Pillar: Digital is the age of innovation. Innovation Management System includes policies, structures, and programs that innovation leaders/managers can use to drive innovation. A defined structure is essential to managing innovation in a corporation, but there's no single structure that will work in every organization. Innovation needs to be a structural process and disciplined approach to discovering and building opportunities in creating new meaningful sources of value to targeted users. However, trying to apply an overly rigid process or structure sets limits to unleash the full innovation potential. Innovation will happen when people are given free space to be creative without holding them back. More precisely, you apply principles of approaches and vary the resource and tool mix by the ever-changing environment for managing a balanced innovation portfolio and build innovation strength via prioritizing resources and managing risks.

The digital Information Technology pillar: Never before has the lightweight digital technology moved more quickly and missteps have larger trajectory impacts on every aspect of the business. Today’s technology enables companies to leverage their various environments, or ecosystems, to chase innovation, unlock potential, and accelerate performance. IT as the digital pillar is actually more powerful, but lightweight. Information Technology as the strong pillar of the digital transformation means that IT can not only "keep the lights on," to get the fundamental right, but also help their company achieve its business goals in any way possible, and even make impossible possible. IT needs to be telling the business about opportunities and possibilities and that means IT needs to really understand the goals of the business and synchronize with business goals. With these insights, organizations acquire the ability to reshape products, services, and customer engagement. If applicable, increase output. This means a higher profit and accelerated speed.

The People Pillar: People are always the most important asset and capital investment in any organization before, today, and in the future. Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the dynamic business environment. To build a powerful people pillar of the digital transformation, there are some of the issues where must be aware of the integration of a single talent capability into an integrated enterprise people management capability across all enterprises, to amplify the collective capability and improve differentiated business competency. Today's digital workforce is multi-generational, multicultural, and multi-devicing. Thus, digital talent management needs to reflect such a digital paradigm shift. Businesses must be alert to the digital dynamic environment, adapt their workforce planning and talent development strategies to ensure their digital workforce is engaged, innovative, and transformative.

The Culture Pillar:
The Culture is collective mindsets, attitude, and habits that could be considered part of the people skills/competencies component to model a business capability. Your culture guides and informs ‘How you do WHAT you do and should point you to WHY you do it.’ It’s a soft, but tough element which can harden the hardest, to lift your organization to the next level of digital maturity effortlessly, or sink your business tragically. Culture is invisible, but the culture system is a powerful pillar to run a digital organization. In order to move up to the next level of organizational maturity, the culture needs to be changed as well to adapt to the emerging digital trend and pulling strategy execution towards the right decision. Culture adoption happening is like a wave. Senior Management starts the wave coming into the shore, but it then has to reach the beach (bottom) before it can go back out. If your culture embraces the future, inspires others, being a customer fanatic, and then it forms the dynamic digital environment and high-mature digital organization.

The Changeability pillar: Digital is all about changes, and change is multifaceted with increasing speed and velocity. Thus, changeability is the crucial pillar that keeps the business dynamic, energetic, and adaptive. It is important to assess the current state of changeability with key elements such as people, process, and technology. The process, technology, capability tuning. etc, are all tactics to get the organization there; but it all starts with the realization that "we can't stay the same." It takes a logical scenario to manage change lifecycle and build changeability step-wisely. The change shouldn’t be for its own sake, it is also important to develop the business justification for changes and determine demand and estimated pipeline. It is a strategic imperative to define the target change management capability via identifying the change gaps, sourcing the mix set of skills, identifying change agents, and tuning the business process to deliver the desired changeability.

The Digital Capability Pillar: The organization’s capabilities are business competency to execute its strategy and deliver value to its customers. How effective strategy execution is directly dependent on how coherent business capabilities is. Business Capabilities are the abilities to produce specific goods or services for serving customers, gaining market shares, and building business competency. They are essentially underpinned by business processes that are embodied in the knowledge capital of a digital organization. Capabilities have outcomes; they collaborate with each other and are enabled by processes. The organization’s competency is based on the set of differentiated and cohesive capabilities and how fast and effective they can be built upon. The maturity of a business capability would be based on the ability to deliver on customer needs or to achieve the desired capability outcome, with maturity attributes, such as "quality," “agility,” “flexibility,” "value," and ”measurability."


The Digital Performance Pillar: Enterprise performance management is about how organizations manage performance at both strategic and operational level to achieve the well-set business goals and objectives. Performance measurements are the number in context, the good measurement aids setting the direction for the digital transformation journey. Selecting the right measure and measuring it right are both art and science. Avoid silo thinking, individual goals typically are goals that are based on a subsection of a department's goals, and the division goals are always the coherent part of the company’s goal. Key Performance Indicators influence management behavior as well as business culture, and poorly designed or implemented KPIs can be very damaging the "culture of the team" and the quality of business execution. Hence, it is important to advocate a holistic performance management system for enforcing and maintaining trust, transparency, and collaboration.

Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem, it is important to define the vision, discover the blind spots, identify unknowns, build strong pillars, and then consciously manage the business performance and accelerate digital transformation effectively.

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