Three Pillars in Digital Transformation

It is important in helping business leaders define the vision, discover the blind spots, identify unknowns, build strong pillars.

Digital transformation is a long journey with many bumps and curves on the way. The digital transformation means that companies need to infuse digital into every aspect of the business, expand to every dimension of the organization, shape the enterprise-wide digital capabilities and overall ecosystem which include people, processes, and technology.

Here are three pillars of digital transformation.

IT pillar: IT pillar is not just about technology only, in fact, information management becomes more critical to keep the business flow, enable business growth, and respond to changes. Thus, the role of digital CIO is to identify and blend the ways that information and technology can assist and shape the business by linking all digital aspects together to enhance cross-functional communication and collaboration. With the abundance of information, IT can abstract the customer insight and business foresight, and provide businesses with the ability to apply real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before. IT needs to be telling the business about opportunities and possibilities and that means IT needs to really understand the goals of the business and synchronize with business goals. With these insights, organizations acquire the ability to reshape products, services, and customer engagement. IT as the strong pillar of the digital transformation means that IT should help their company achieve its business goals in any way possible, and even make the impossible possible. Traditional IT organizations are often perceived as static and too heavyweight. There are too many large-scale transformational programs based on the introduction of new technology either run for years with little progress towards the original goals or hailed as a tremendous success only to never be accepted into the Line of Business departments. IT has to speed up, IT as the digital pillar is actually more powerful, but lightweight. IT is a business “solutionary” to understand how the organization works and then give solutions that will increase the functionality to lower cost and, if applicable, increase output. This means a higher profit.

People Pillar: People are always the most important asset and capital investment in any organization before, today, and in the future. Neither an individual's career path or the business's growth life cycle is linear nowadays. Thus, the capabilities to adapt to unpredictable, ride above the learning curve are critical to making continuous improvement and the seamless digital transformation. Today's digital workforce is changing significantly with the characteristics of multi-generation, multicultural, and multi-devicing. Thus, digital talent management needs to reflect such a digital paradigm shift. Organizations and their people learn through their interactions with the dynamic business environment. They observe, act, and take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future action. To build a powerful people pillar of the digital transformation, there are some of the issues where must be aware of the integration of a single talent capability into an integrated enterprise people management capability across all enterprises, to amplify the collective capability and improve differentiated business competency. So, businesses must be alert to the digital dynamic environment, adapt their workforce planning and talent development strategies to ensure their digital workforce is engaged, innovative, and transformative.

Changeability pillar: Digital is all about changes, and change is multifaceted with increasing speed and velocity. Change is no longer just a couple of random business initiatives, it has to become an ongoing business capability. Thus, changeability is the crucial pillar that keeps the business dynamic, energetic, and adaptive. The process, technology, capability tuning. etc, are all tactics to get the organization there; but it all starts with the realization that "we can't stay the same." It takes a logical scenario to manage the change lifecycle and build changeability step-wisely. It is important to assess the current state of changeability with key elements such as people, process, and technology; change shouldn’t be for its own sake, it is also important to develop the business justification about changes and determine demand and estimated pipeline. It is a strategic imperative to define the target change management capability via identifying the change gaps, sourcing the mix set of skills, identifying change agents, and tuning the business process to deliver the desired changeability.

Consider the digital organization as the self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem, and humans are vehicles of natural and cultural solutions. It is important in helping business leaders define the vision, discover the blind spots, identify unknowns, build strong pillars, and then consciously manage the business performance and accelerate digital transformation effectively.  

Posted in: culture Master,Digital Maturity,Digitalization,IT Transformation