How to Tap the Digital Power to Re-imagine the “Art of Possible” ~ Future of CIO

Friday, December 15, 2017

How to Tap the Digital Power to Re-imagine the “Art of Possible”

11:29 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Digital power is the combination of the power of knowledge, the power of information and technology, the power of the crowd, and power of creativity.

Enterprises of the future are increasingly exhibiting “VUCA” digital characteristics in various shades and intensity. Businesses are looking for new innovative methods and next practices for management of complexity, products/service delivery, quality improvement, capacity construction, and competency building, etc. Forward-looking organizations are tapping the power of digital to reimagine the “art of possible” and reach the next level of business maturity.

The power of digital mindset: The individual’s “thinking box" is a mental construct made up of personal and environmental components that they operate within. Compared to the “old days,” with the scarcity of information and silo setting, most people have considerably smaller thinking box and follow conventional wisdom based on a very limited thinking box they shape quite a long time ago. In the hyperconnected digital age with abundance of information and unprecedented technology advancement, to survive and thrive, people have to step outside that box to unfamiliar territory, seek additional knowledge and experience, so they can expand into a much bigger box, let creative mind run free, and they are able to think with a new perspective, understand and solve problems from different angles. In fact, the power of thinking is fundamental to all collective progress we’ve been made. Shaping the bigger, much bigger box of thinking is evolutionary at the cognitive level. Today’s digital leaders and professionals must practice how to tap into their most powerful and brilliant mode of thinking anytime, anywhere, and under any circumstances. Only when our minds are open to believing things existing outside of our box, there is the room to broaden our thoughts, there is continuous progress we could make, and there’s the chance to make a quantum leap of the digital transformation.

The power of information: Information and technology catalyze today's digital powerhouses with the power to respond change quickly and innovate relentlessly. Information brings about business ideas; business ideas generate lots of information. Effective Information Management can provide businesses the ability to apply real-time insights of the organization in ways never possible before. With these insights, organizations acquire the ability to reshape products, services, customer satisfaction and employee engagement. Information, in fact, is the gold mine every ambitious business across the sector try to dig in. As companies transform themselves into the digital business that is based on ‎information, their ability to explore intangible assets such as information and knowledge has become far more decisive to build the competitive business advantage. Because information-based business insight and foresight enable the organization to improve the speed of transaction, decision-making, idea-generation, and talent growth and development. Real-time insight and foresight enable organizations to see the future more clearly. Information flow can further streamline idea flow, impact the velocity of capital flow, and thus, the business flow through the economic system.

The power of hyperconnectivity: Digital is about connectivity, which means to have the better ability for dots connection across the geographical, functional, organizational, industrial, or generational boundaries. Digital organizations are complex. It becomes complex if things do interact, particularly in the case of "nonlinear" interaction. Increasingly, enterprises find themselves enmeshed in "ecosystems." For the most part, while businesses can influence and get influenced by these "ecosystems." Thus, they have to understand what it means within their organization, but much more importantly, they have to understand the external changing connected environment or the entire business ecosystem. Digital organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, or interrelational interactions brings the new cycle of the business growth and the next level of organizational maturity. The hyper-connectivity of the digital organization enables the business to approach the flow zone for improving accountability, breaking down silos and embrace collective perspectives to solve common challenges or wick problems. The aspect which matters to tap the digital power is ensuring that the enterprise is connected to all the appropriate ecosystem, lattice or otherwise, touch points, for improving idea flows, enforcing cross-functional communication, harnessing large scale of collaboration, and catalyze the full spectrum of digital innovation.

Digital power is the combination of the power of knowledge, the power of information and technology, the power of the crowd, and power of creativity. Forward-thinking organizations must have a long-term vision, insightful leadership, fine-tuned processes and recombinant capabilities to tap the full digital power, unleash the business potential and re-imagine the “Art of Possible.”