Friday, July 28, 2017

Enforcing Three Fundamental Business Factors for Improving Business Maturity

The journey of improving business maturity is more evolutionary than revolutionary.


Forward-looking organizations are reaching the inflection point from doing digital to being digital, from being digitally disrupted to be a digital disrupter. Digital Maturity matters, because digital transformation discipline is not just about some stand-alone initiatives, it requires a vision for 'WHY' and a solid strategy for "WHAT" and "HOW" you want to transform radically. Companies are gradually opening up to the next practice to enforce digital ways and build up digital competency with a set of unique capabilities. More specifically, how to enforce these fundamental elements of the business: People, process, and technology, in order to expedite change and improve business maturity.

Organizational structure and business process tuning: The forward-looking organizations always continue to learn and strike the right balance between “old” and “new” way to do things and keep building a differentiated set of capabilities. Digital is the age of customer-centricity, seeing the customer as a highly integrated part of the organization’s processes. Digital business processes become more customer-centric or customer value-driven process orientation. Processes define how basic and routine functions are executed consistently across the organization to implement the strategy. Any existing business function that is in conflict with a dynamic digital strategy is an issue, and the processes associated with that function are therefore problematic. Thus, tuning organizational structures and business processes become a continuous journey to improve business efficiency and organizational maturity. You can optimize the company's processes, implement process automation, implementation and monitoring which will eventually enhance and improve an organization’s efficiency; which would increase its productivity and profit in the market. It helps in reduction of time to market, improved customer satisfaction, achieved cost efficiency and maximize revenue. Moreover, it helps in reducing waste through value stream design, management system design, employee empowerment and enhancing digitized operations.


IT-business integration: The digital CIO is an inherently cross-functional role, to help bridge the business and technology, the information and wisdom, the organization and the digital ecosystem, the silo industrial age and the digital era. IT proactively works as an integral part of the business to capitalize on opportunities via leading the transformation, or IT delivers the tailored solutions to the business problems which meet the business’s requirement or satisfy customers' needs. To improve the overall organizational maturity, IT needs to keep moving forward from IT-business alignment to the IT-business integration stage. Therefore, the top management team should work on identifying opportunities for enhancing IT- business relationship and clarify strategies and business goals, empower IT leaders to drive changes and take the step-wise approach to lead the digital transformation. The high integration of business and IT can improve the overall organizational responsiveness, effectiveness, performance, speed, and maturity.

People’s attitude and professional maturity are an important success factor to drive changes and catalyze digital evolution: Many leading organizations are reaching the inflection point for digital transformation. It’s the act of inflecting or the state of being inflected. The inflection point is the moment when the way business is being conducted changes more radically, it creates new opportunities for businesses that adept at executing and operating. It's the time to be more aggressive to expedite and also the time to be more cautious to avoid pitfalls. As our digitized world becomes hyper-connected, over-complex and interdependent, from leadership development and talent management perspective, the advanced digital workforce should continue to depoliticize working culture, dismantle bureaucracy, solve business problems via multidimensional thinking and multiple choice of solutions. High-Quality digital leaders and professionals can make sound judgments and effective decisions; who are clear about their responsibility and added value in the organization and the world, and who have the expertise and integrity to substantiate what they stand for, who works according to the principles, but with the courage to break the rule, if it’s out of date. There is also an increasing focus on cultural elements and behaviors in the organizations and how that affects the organizational effectiveness and maturity. Organizations need to pay more attention to creating shared and admirable goals and then encourage the teams to compete and collaborate as they deem fit. Clear- define digital principles and specific expected behaviors and provide a framework in which to operate (strategy, structure, people, processes, and rewards) that supports those behaviors. If you are truly interested in culture change then you need to understand how cultures evolve to dramatically accelerate the digital transformation and to increase the likelihood of sustainable change. When high-competitive teams laser focuses on the shared goals of the organization, they compete professionally and complement (when needed) towards the attainment of the shared goals and that creates a conducive environment for the collective potential to unleash and collective capability to flourish.


The journey of improving business maturity is more evolutionary than revolutionary. It is necessary for the coherent use of various already known concepts. It is certainly critical to put the stronger emphasis on empowering people, the source of knowledge, innovations/adaptations and customer centricity. It is not easy to calculate the ROI especially on soft competency, it takes the time to monitor and prove it. There is no magic formula to improve the digital maturity of the business. It takes practices, practices, and practices more to enforce digital processes and sharpen all crucial business success factor to get digital ready.


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