Saturday, July 8, 2017

Hyperconnectivity as the “Nature” of Digital Businesses

Connectivity is the “nature” of today’s organization, and hyperconnectivity is the symbol of digital maturity.

Hyperconnectivity is one of the most critical characteristics of the digital business. Digital organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, or interrelational interactions brings the new cycle of business growth, information flow, innovation, and maturity. The digital organization is a living thing, it cannot be taken apart. As you cannot understand a cell, a living thing if you isolate it from its context. It is a cohesive whole.    

The Hyperconnectivity of the digital world requires people to see things through the broader lens: Digital means holism and interconnectivity. The digital ecosystem is complex and volatile, for complex problem solving, understanding context is often the first and the important step in framing, create the relevant context to make a more lasting solution - without it, you are working without any boundaries, or basis for understanding what you are doing. You lose trustful repose which you experienced when you blindly follow the traditional ways of thinking to solve the over-complex problems today. Therefore, it’s important for digital leaders and managers to learn how to leverage Systems Thinking to understand the systemic wholeness, to see the interconnectedness of the parts and the whole. It’s about seeing interrelationships rather than isolated things, for understanding patterns of changes rather than static “snapshots.” From a practical problem-solving perspective, being digital fluent in contextual intelligence aids you in understanding what’s relevant and what’s not. 'Seeing' the context you are 'part' of, allows one to identify the leverage points of the system and then 'choose' the 'decisive' factors, in the attempt to achieve the business performance and improve the organizational maturity.

The hyper-connectivity of the digital organization enables the business to approach the flow zone for improving accountability: Digital blurs the geographical, functional, organizational, and even industrial borders nowadays. Traditional hierarchical lines will phase out and a collective of business partners will emerge working collaboratively to set digital strategy and achieve organizational goals collaboratively. To keep the hyper connectivity nature of the business, the challenge for organizations is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational interdependence with the appropriate mix of enabling organizational elements, maintain the right level of digital balance. From an organizational structure perspective, an organization achieves this state of equilibrium through its management layers. An organization can approach the flow zone when the positions in its hierarchy have clear, accountable tasks. Limited hierarchy works best in a highly connected and creative environment where the free flow of ideas and their prompt implementation is a key element of success. Delayering becomes a lens through which it is possible to examine and then fix many other issues.        

The hyper-connectivity of the organization catalyzes digital innovation: Digital is the age of innovation because creativity is about connecting the dots in the wider scope. Digital is about connectivity, it means to have a better ability for dots connection across the geographical, functional, organizational, industrial, or generational boundaries. How cleverly you connect your dots by leveraging your experiences and finding a solution to the problems is creativity which is also an important aspect of digital fluency. At today's hyper-connected digital world, the disruptions come almost overnight, and the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart. And the enterprise is nothing more than a ‘switch’ in the network lattice of the ecosystem. Try to digitally connect key resources and assets in the context of the idea reaching innovation hubs and clusters across the digital ecosystem. That, in turn, will further fuel more collaboration in innovative initiatives to their environments. The aspect which matters is ensuring that the enterprise is connected to all the appropriate eco-system, lattice or otherwise, touch points, for improving idea flows, and catalyze digital innovation.

Connectivity is the “nature” of today’s organization, and hyperconnectivity is the symbol of digital maturity. Digital is fluid, digital is also complex. It becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interaction. You can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. But when you respect the connecting nature of the digital business, leverage systems thinking, fine-tune the organizational structure, connect wider dots to fuel innovation, you are on the right way to run a high mature digital organization.

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