How to Reach Digital Maturity From Functioning to Firm to Delight

Organizational maturity is assessed based on the overall business effectiveness, efficiency, operational excellence, responsiveness, performance, innovation, intelligence, resilience, and people-centricity. 

The organization or company may be in business for many years but has not matured its management disciplines and structural flexibility. Companies need to embed digital into the very fabric of the business, explore digital management practices in a structural way in order to make a seamless shift from functioning to firm to delight, and reach the higher maturity of the business to get digital ready.

The state of digital flow: Digital means flow - mind flow, energy flow, information flow, idea flow, and business flow. The classic organizational management usually enhances silos and overly rigid hierarchy. But digital organizations, like individuals, are living things, need to be in flow to operate smoothly and to exercise for keeping energized and achieving the state of delight. From information management perspective, a highly intellectual and highly effective digital organization has a higher level of responsiveness because information can flow into the right people to allow them making right decisions at the right time to bring better result and accelerate digital speed. In fact, in this information-abundant digital age, there isn't really much of an enterprise without the massive oceans of information that flow through the enterprise at any given split second. It is so critical to streamlining information flow across functional boundaries because information brings about business ideas and insight to enable organizations grasping business growth opportunities and preventing potential risks, to build a people-centric organization. Information flows and penetrates through the business to make the digital organization more responsive, dynamic antifragile, and therefore, delightful.

The full spectrum of digital innovation: Digital is the age of innovation. Innovation is to have a new perspective on things and gain the benefit by doing something different. Leading only through operational considerations is not the way forward. in most organizations, innovation is still a serendipity. When organizations just follow the old rules, have “we always do things like that” mentality and less appetite for change, they are getting stale, without maximizing its full potential. Digital organizations should build innovation as a differentiated business competency, learn how to solve problems creatively and manage a balanced innovation portfolio systematically. Innovation follows basic rules, which are adapted depending on the company's situation and ambition. Digital innovation has a broader spectrum, it can be categorized as empowered innovation (creative disruption), sustainable innovation (better version of product/service) or efficiency innovation (process improvement), and soft innovation (management/communication/culture rejuvenation). Innovation is one of the core activities of the digital revolution and societal progress, in order to move up the digital maturity from functioning to delight.

The delightful working environment with harmonized minds, hearts and hands: Statistically, there is the very low employee engagement rate in many organizations across the industrial sectors. There will be better business results achieved if it's a place where people look forward to coming to work, know that they are appreciated and trusted, have work that interests and challenges them, and have some fun. It means the challenge for today’s business management is how to win hearts, minds, and profits to improve the top line business growth. Build an open environment to encourage inquisitiveness and inspire innovation, push teams to “think in the bigger box” and develop a culture of learning and creativity in the workplace where the only thing you get fired for not asking hard questions. In the high-mature digital organizations, thinking differently is the foundation to build an inclusive and innovative team and one of the key determinants of whether an organization can move to new digital structures is the development level of the people, either at the cognitive level or skill/capability level. In practice, creating positive change and building a delightful working environment is a joint effort and co-responsibility of management and employees. It needs to involve your entire team at all levels, exhibit positive thinking and proper behaviors at all times. Shifting a team's focus to bigger picture objectives is key and that managers are the owners of this messaging. The goal is to overcome the barriers and roadblocks that have so far hindered people engagement and harmonize minds, hearts, and hands to unleash collective human potential.

Organizational maturity is assessed based on the overall business effectiveness, efficiency, operational excellence, responsiveness, performance, innovation, intelligence, resilience, and people-centricity. There are different types of organizations and different cycles in their business maturity, equally, individuals have their own learning, growth, and maturity cycles as well. In practice, the journey of digitalization is to improve business maturity from functioning to firm to delight.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digital Maturity