The New Book “Digital Gaps” Chapter IV Introduction: Digital Capability Gaps ~ Future of CIO

Monday, March 27, 2017

The New Book “Digital Gaps” Chapter IV Introduction: Digital Capability Gaps

11:23 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

It is crucial to identify and close enterprise capability gaps for achieving the business coherence and improving organizational maturity.

The capability is the ability to do something and achieve certain outcomes in a consistent way. The corporate capability is the collective ability to implement strategy, innovation and make changes. The organization’s capabilities can be categorized into both competitive necessity and competitive uniqueness. Statistically, the capability-based strategy has much higher success rate than the other style of strategy crafting. Capability gap is the lack of a capability to build business competency or managing changes. Hence, it is critical to identify and close business capability gaps and build organizational competencies for achieving strategic business goals.

Bridging effectiveness gaps: Doing the wrong things differently isn’t transformation. There are a number of challenges common in transformation programs, such as getting the right strategies, execution, great leadership to drive changes, and a broader view of consumer demand, etc. Either change or more radical business transformation are to solve the problem small or large. Effectiveness is about doing the right things. Doing the wrong things differently isn’t transformation. That is the importance of good transformation practice within a motivated change culture oriented to the right work for the right reasons. A solution is nothing if the problem is not perceived accurately. Therefore, creating the awareness of the problem is the first step to making a solution being understood and accepted. Digital transformation starts with the realization of the gaps where you currently no longer can deliver the business objective and vision of success for your company and shareholders. Determining what the future needs to look like, and what the transformation must look like is the next step. There are many pitfalls on the way for digital transformation, hence, it’s important to bridge the effectiveness gap. First things first, frame the right questions before answering them, ensure doing the right things before doing things right.

Bridging the gaps between capability and process: view Capability and process are two viewpoints of an organization. An organization has the capability to deliver outcomes, an organization executes processes to deliver an output of the organization, leverage people, process, and technology to achieve business goals. Capability view is for the strategic re-think of “What,” and the process view is about the executable know “How.” A process view will cause stakeholders to limit their thinking to process deficiencies, and not consider the other resources inherent in exercising the process; by leveraging capability view, they readily consider service, people, process, information, asset, etc, dimensions of the adequacy of the capability to fulfill their business strategy. Capability provides a level of abstraction that allows more open consideration. Capabilities are WHAT abilities/competencies an organization has/needs. Process are HOW an organization does something. Both capability and process view are useful in managing business transformation, which to use depends on the purpose you have in mind. A process view gets into technical details, and capability view of the enterprise helps businesses identify “actuality, capability, and potentiality,” build competency and improve the overall business maturity.

Closing the learning capability gap: Learning becomes the knowledge builder and we can define learning through the information it absorbs and the capability it builds. Learning is a process and everyone has an enormous capacity to learn. Limitations on learning are barriers invented by humans to create gaps which stifle changes and innovation. In the digital era, the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened, digital workforce today has to learn and relearn all the time, and then apply those lessons to succeed in new situations, and a collective learning capability is a strategic imperative the company’s long-term success. Learning becomes knowledge builder and we can define learning through the information it absorbs and capability it builds. It is important to cultivate the learning culture that has awareness and understanding the importance of learning in order to bridge the learning capability gaps and build a high-innovative and high-mature digital organization. From a management perspective, to bridge the learning capability gap, it is also imperative to improve knowledge management which involves the use of technologies and processes with the aim of optimizing the value that is generated and with the goal to improve the organization’s collective learning capabilities and ultimate business competency.

It is crucial to identify and close enterprise capability gap for achieving the business coherence and improving organizational maturity. A cohesive set of business capabilities builds into the business competency. And a core business competency is a deep proficiency that enables a company to deliver unique value to customers, engage employees, out beat competitors, and achieve high-performance business results.