The New Book Introduction:"Digital Gap: Closing Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Digital Businesses" ~ Future of CIO

Thursday, March 23, 2017

The New Book Introduction:"Digital Gap: Closing Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Digital Businesses"

10:48 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Today’s digital organizations simply just can’t stand still. Bridging the 'gap of opportunity' between where you are and want to become is a welcomed challenge.

We are at the age of digital dawn; hyper-connectivity is one of the most critical digital characteristics which make the business holistic and the world smaller. Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that simply adopting a new digital technology is insufficient. You have to transform the company's underlying functions and organization as a whole with adjusted digital speed. Otherwise, companies may begin a decline from its previous good performance. However, many business managers today still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of leading changes, create the multitude of gaps blocking the way of the radical digital transformation. Being divided by so many chasms across leadership, management, and innovation, etc., organizations lose their collaborative advantage as they are being over managed and under led, remain disconnected, hoard knowledge, decrease effectiveness, and do not have the competence to collaborate in the long term.

“Digital Gaps -Bridging Multiple Gaps to Run Cohesive Business” is a guide book to help digital leaders and professionals today identify, analyze, and mind multiple gaps with multidisciplinary insight and holistic understanding. Today’s digital organization simply just can’t stand still. Bridging the 'gap of opportunity' between where you are and want to become is a welcomed challenge and a step-wise approach to making a leap of digital transformation.

Chapter 1: Cognitive gaps: Cognition is the mental process of acquiring knowledge through thought, experience, and senses. The "mind" represents our consciousness and awareness. Cognition is a perception, sensation, and insight. People are different, not because we look differently, but because we think differently. Bridging cognitive gaps is about minding creativity gap, problem-solving gap, and insight gap.

Chapter 2: Leadership gaps: There are many multinational companies around, but very few global companies; and there are many multinational business executives, but very few truly global leaders. Digital leadership gaps are a reality, not fiction. Competition at the leading edge of business is fierce at the age of digitalization and globalization. if you are not taking steps now to shrink that leadership gaps, you will not be prepared to lead the digital business in the future. Successful companies need to grow and innovate, investing in, and developing the next generation of leadership is one of the best ways to do that.

Chapter 3: Management gaps: Traditional management is about applying the reductionistic methodology to achieve business efficiency, and holistic digital management is about leveraging Systems Thinking to ensure the overall health of the business ecosystem. Most organizations at the industrial era operate in the functional silos and digital management focuses on broader collaboration. Hence, it is a strategic imperative to close the gaps between traditional management and digital management in order to enforce cross-functional collaboration and improve business effectiveness and maturity.

Chapter 4: Capability Gaps: A capability is an ability that a person, an organization, or a system possesses to perform and achieve a certain result. 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. Forward-looking organizations craft capability-based strategies to ensure the smooth implementation. Therefore, it is critical to identify and close business capability gaps and build organizational competency for reaching the long-term business vision and achieving strategic business goals.

Chapter 5: Professional Gaps: Generally speaking, a professional is an individual with the expertise of some specific area, who earns his or her livings from that expertise. Being professional also means that the individual not only has the skill but also presents the high-quality professionalism such as positive mentality and attitude, fair judgment and good behaviors. A professional is an individual who strives to represent skill and delivers quality. Being a digital professional means consistency. Lack of professional maturity causes a digital professional gap. Being a digital professional inherently and inextricably links with high levels of “professionalism.”

Digitalization does make the world more hyperconnected and interdependent than ever. When things get connected in this way, any entity wishing to negotiate a successful journey has to understand what the implications of this degree of connectivity mean to them. They have to understand what it means within their organization and the business ecosystem. Transformation is a journey rather than a destination. Make the digital transformation journey worth the effort.