Three Linchpins for Connecting to the Digital New Normal

Digital organizations need to keep tuning structures and processes, become more adaptable and innovative.

Running a digital business represents the next stage of business maturity which will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its ecosystem, with people at the center of its focus. To break down silos and overly rigid hierarchy, businesses need to emphasize communication, participation, relationships, and realize that they will need to renew themselves periodically to cope effectively with change and have a fluid structure that responds effectively to the business dynamic. The digital world is so information-savvy, change-intensive, and innovation-driven, here are three linchpins to connect the digital new normal and improve business responsiveness, performance, and speed.

Information Management as the linchpin of running a real-time digital business: Though digitalization is not just about adopting some fancy new technologies. Information Technology plays a crucial role in leading the digital paradigm shift. Information is the lifeblood of the digital organization, and information management is the linchpin of running a real-time digital business. Information does not live alone but permeates to everywhere in the businesses. Thus, the value of information is not isolated. Information can either enforce cognitive understanding or sometimes misleading or cause distraction due to incomplete information or false knowledge. The goal of Information Management is to make the full data-performance life cycle: Data- information-analysis -insight- decisions-performance effectively. Poor information management implies not understanding what raw material they have to play with and lack of business insight to grasp emerging opportunities, predict risks and respond to changes in fast-enough speed. An information-savvy organization can store, retrieve, process. and refine information efficiently, to ensure the right people getting the right information to make right decisions timely. Information Management as the linchpin is to connect silos, keep information flow, idea flow, and thus, business flow.

Change as the linchpin of strategy and implementation: Digital organizations are dynamic with fast-growing information and continuous disruptions. Change Management needs to go hand-in-hand with strategy management. Change is no longer just an isolated business initiative, it needs to be built as an ongoing core business capability and a mechanism embedded into underlying business processes or functions. Change cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished. It has to be woven into communication, process, and action of the organization. Change, in many business circumstances, has to go deeper, fine-tune the underlying functions or manage intangible business elements, and become the linchpin between strategy and implementation. Change inertia is one of the fatal issues to cause the business mighty fail. Sometimes people are not part of change because they feel like they don’t need any change, and even the ones who recognize the importance or urgency of change, do not understand their own role, impact and most importantly, emotions involved in a change process. In today's over-complex work environment, change is happening at a more rapid pace. If you make change part of your operation routine and your DNA - and then change becomes easier to deal with, the business can move forward effortlessly.

Inclusiveness as the linchpin of digital innovation: Being innovative is the state of mind. In the business setting, there is no innovation without inclusiveness. The most innovative working environment and the most advanced societies are diverse mixtures of peoples that can spark creativity and amplify innovation effect. Inclusiveness is the linchpin of digital innovation. Competitive advantage can be created by bringing together diverse groups of people whose mindsets, experiences, preferences, skills, and capabilities are complementary to one another. Diversity makes the organizations stronger. From innovation perspective, diversity should refer to the cognitive difference. We are idea-rich and vision clear through inclusiveness. Because people can learn a lot from different mindsets, cultures, and positions, so organizations as a whole can be competitive enough to keep surging further. It is important to build an open environment where individuals or groups need to generate creative results regularly and frequently, diversity becomes the engine for creativity, and inclusiveness becomes the linchpin for connecting important building blocks of constructing new digital competency.

Digital organizations need to keep tuning structures and processes, become more adaptable and innovative, take advantage of the latest digital technology platforms and tools, integrate and knit all important business element into business competencies, for connecting to the digital new normal.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization