Five Stages from “Doing Digital” to “Being Digital”

Doing digital is about taking a few actions, and being digital is the fundamental shift from the mindsets to behaviors. 

Organizational digitalization is not just about using the latest technology gadgets or applying fancy tools. At the high maturity level, organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation. There are a couple of evolutional ecosystems stages businesses have to experience in order to ride above the learning curve and move up the business maturity from “Doing Digital,” to “Being Digital.”

The BASIC paradigm of the ecosystem needs to be worked out: Digital transformation is the long journey with many bumps and curves on the way. It is important in helping leaders define the vision, discover the blind spots, identify unknowns, and then consciously manage the communication gap between self-perception and the perception of others. Transforming, generating, ascending and core-shifting individuals, teams, even the whole organization! That's the starting point. When the need for significant change is identified, it's generally naive to think it will succeed without transformation as well. The digital transformation is mainly the dynamic problem-framing and problem-solving continuum. Every serious problem we face today as a species has been caused by a certain level of dysfunction. And human dysfunction is caused by the interaction of hidden (intangible and invisible) human affective, cognitive, imaginative and connotative functions and content. In other words, the wrong focus, the wrong assumptions, the wrong ends, and the wrong means. When these hidden human functions and content are wrong, you are in the downfall spiral. Hence, the basic digital paradigm shift is to understand the real problems underneath and start solving them in the right way.

The digital ecosystem EXPANDs when the business community broadens its scope and consumes all sorts of resources: Digital is about hyperconnectivity and interdependence. The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. A digital organization is an organic system. It will be organized as an organic system, with cells that have a function, an infrastructure for input and output and for signaling, a “brain” to process information, generate ideas, and make decisions. How these ideas are recognized, filtered and dealt with will become a crucial factor in an organization's success in producing digitized products and services, enhancing its competitive business capabilities, and expanding its influence with the ability to co-create in a digital ecosystem -treats customers, channel partners, suppliers, and industry ecosystem participants as active agents who have permission to combine the modular capabilities exposed in a platform to create new experiences and expand its impact.

Today’s digital dynamic enables companies to leverage their various environments, or ecosystems, to chase INNOVATION and accelerate performance: The hyper-connecting nature of digital offers particularly fertile ground for developing cross-industry ecosystems and innovation opportunities, in part because ways of doing business and customer expectations both tend to be more flexible than the siloed industrial age, and companies need new ecosystem partners to pursue them. The dynamic digital organization needs to be an innovation powerhouse in which creativity is encouraged, and innovative problem-solving via cross-functional collaboration is the new normal. If you look at a business as a collection of subsystems, in simplest terms, the organizational factors are how those subsystems are structured within the larger system and how they interact with each other. Those interactions can be technical, informational, human, or structural, to name a few.

Organizations and their people learn through their INTERACTION with the environment: They act, observe the consequences of their action, make inferences about those consequences and draw implications for future action. Encourage people to think in bigger boxes" (think outside of your job description and consider company and industry and even societal impacts). The key point is that more and more creativity and innovation is a matter of survival in the long term for any organization, and lead to the creative economy at the macro level. The dynamic and enrich interaction can accelerate performance and talent multiplication to harness innovation capability.

Digital organizations need to keep evolving, renewing, and achieving the state of dynamic balance: The digital paradigm shift is inevitable. The real power of social technology comes from the innate appeal of interacting socially and intellectual stimulation that people derive from sharing what they know, expressing opinions and learning what others know and think. Organizations today need to constantly improve the business and seeing change as an opportunity while keeping a holistic overview of the business are the core messages of the text. To achieve such a state of dynamic balance, a radically different social and economic structure will be needed. So the organization of the future starts with a changing nature. The dynamic design allows the organization to morph into living conditions and organizational capacities change to allow a better fit for the purpose. And, when that purpose is fulfilled, or a more compelling purpose appears, then the organization can morph again and move on to the next great purpose. It keeps evolving in a healthy life cycle to achieve the state of dynamic balance.

Doing digital is about taking a few actions, and being digital is the fundamental shift from the mindset to behavior. Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced environments, and humans are vehicles of natural and cultural solutions. From the economic and organizational point of view, people are able to adapt themselves and their organization through a collaborative approach to understanding, learning, accelerating performance, and innovating.

Posted in: Digital Balance,Digital Master,Digital Maturity,Digitalization