Setting Digital Principles to Guide Through Digital Transformation

The digital credos are the top principles to guide through changes and digital transformation in the organization.

Credo is a Latin word that means "a set of fundamental beliefs or a guiding principle." For a company, a credo is a set of well-defined principles based on its management philosophy. Principles are general rules and guidelines, intended to be enduring and seldom amended. Philosophy is the history of ideas and an ongoing inquiry into the nature of things based on abstract reasoning rather than empirical method. Digital means flow; digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes and business dynamic to get digital ready. The challenge is to prioritize what you know about and keep an eye open for signs of things you don't know about. Therefore, it is important to develop your own company tailored credos to inspire change mentality, motivate positive attitude and good behaviors, and to generate winning concepts for digital transformation on a consistent basis.

Setting digital credos to guide through change and business transformation: Change is costly. Digital transformation is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity.  The very characteristics of digital new normals are nonlinearity, adaptability, unrepeatability, unpredictability, and denial of control. The digital credos are the top principles to guide through changes and digital transformation in the organization. They are not just the static rules or rigid processes to stifle innovation. Instead, they are the philosophy behind the methodologies, and they are the mindsets behind behaviors and actions. First, it is important for gaining the knowledge necessary to understand and manage complex systems. Secondly, the most challenging one is to understand how the people factor affects the system, and then managing the complex system and the people of the complex system. Digital transformation does flatten the organizational hierarchy and blurs geographical, functional, organizational, and even industrial borders, it could mean less restrictive rules or silo setting, but it also means that the guiding digital credos become more crucial to be defined as core decision criteria and behavior guidelines. It is less about controls, more about the "big why" clarity and management consistency.

Digital credo is a set of well-defined principles based on the business management philosophy: Philosophy is a Greek portmanteau of the love of wisdom. Philosophy is the mother of all sciences even presently philosophy seems to be the completely different discipline from science. Enterprise principles provide a basis for decision-making throughout an enterprise and inform how the organization sets about fulfilling its mission. Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way the business is conducted, so adopting a new digital technology only is not sufficient. You have to transform the company’s underlying functions, build robust business capabilities, also establish a clear set of digital credos to cultivate a digital culture, in order to run a high-effective and high-mature digital business. Digital transformation is the journey for solving problems caused by "conflict," "out of balance," or “lack of logic,” digital credos help people in the organization better understand digital transformation and compass them through the curves and bumps in the journey of changes.

The most basic principle is that every system is a construct of the mind: The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but also permeating cross-ecosystem which is dynamic, continuous and interactive. The digital ecosystem is complex, it becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "non-linear" interaction, you can't separate things properly or you cannot predict the actual effect of interaction straightforwardly. Every system is like three sides of a con, this side, that side and the integrative relationship between them.  Imagine the complexity that comes in due to these characteristics such as less structure, rules and regulations, diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, lack of linearity and increased flux working and impacting together. There are unknown interactions and very high inner dynamics in complexity. Overcoming complication and managing complexity become one of the biggest challenges in business today. Be following the digital principles, the business lifecycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of reorganizing, refocusing, rebalancing resources, and redirecting people to understand the whole, in terms of its inner processes, its interactions with external systems, its components, the specific interaction among them, etc. Digital credos are abstract guidelines, the reality is a choice, people have the flexibility to choose what reality they prescribe to: Isolation vs. togetherness, stagnation vs. growth, convention vs. innovation, etc, and interdisciplinary management approach is taken for transforming the business into a high mature digital powerhouse.

Digital transformation is worth its weight not just because of its high cost, but because of its high impact on the business’s long-term prosperity. It's important to set the company tailored digital credos, leverage holistic and systems thinking to understand the variety of business relationship and manage the business in a more structural way for sustaining digital business advantage and growth.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization,Principle/Practice