Five Stages of Digitalization

Digitalization is a continuous journey with iterative steps. Don’t rest until you’ve done everything you can do to make your organization as resilient, inventive, inspiring, and accountable as it can be.

Digitalization represents the next stage of business maturity which will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its ecosystem. During the journey, there are many accumulated steps from doing digital to going digital to being digital. Companies need to take the journey with logical steps, embed digital into the very fabric of the business and laser focus on the most important things to get business digital ready.



Exploring: Many organizations are at the stage of experimenting digital, exploring the new opportunities to grow business and figuring out better ways to do things. They develop the next digital practices, figuring out which of them makes sense to challenge and then leveraging creativity tools (exploring, divergence, convergence) to arrive at a useful new box and figure out an alternative solution. Riding the learning curve and catch the digital wave take pre-contemplation, preparation, planning, and implementing. There is the conflict between old and new, innovative businesses refuse to bound by constraints and limitations. Many forward-looking organizations separate the exploitation of existing methods, technologies, processes from the exploration of new ways by leveraging emerging digital trends. The emergence of potential opportunities for exploiting digitization is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digitization journey increases. It requires the balance of courage and caution, learning and doing, standardization and innovation, stability and speed.

Scaling up: Digitalization implies the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted, the business needs to take a framework approach to scale up across the organizational scope. Make the common set of principles and develop the best and next business practices. Digital organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations, interactions, or interrelational interactions amplifies the collective capability to unlock business performance for the organization. The reason why many transformations fail - some soft factors and the challenge of complexity come into play. Therefore, you have to dig deeper to understand intangible business factors and fine-tune the underlying business structures, functions, and processes in order to adapt to the digital new normal, as well as sustain changes. Taking a logical step to scale up means that companies must begin thinking about ways with strategic planning to broaden their vision and revenue streams while becoming more responsive, scalable, high connected and super competitive.

Ecosystem Expanding: The digital organization today is hyper-connected and interdependent, as the switch in its digital ecosystem, keep connecting with its environment. The digital business territories blur, and the digital ecosystem is dynamic, hyperconnected and expansive, it expands when the components broaden their community scopes and consume all sorts of resources. To succeed in today's digital dynamic, the most successful organizations have a very clear vision and understanding of why they exist and the value they bring to customers and the very reason for changes. So, they not only survive the fierce competition but thrive in the expanded digital ecosystem. However, for those lagging organizations, the ecosystems have evolved without much attention or planning. Transformative changes often come outside-in, digital business will always seek and embrace the influences beyond their own company, treat customers, channel partners, suppliers, and industry ecosystem participants as active agents who have permission to share knowledge and combine the modular capabilities exposed in a platform to create new experiences and expand its impact.

Accelerating: Increasing pace of changes and continuous disruption throw the challenge for businesses across sectors to respond and adapt with faster speed. Uncertainty is the beast that organizations need to deal with today, digital-savvy organizations can take dynamic planning, information-based forecast, timely adjustment, and relentless implementation. Many organizations reach the inflection point to accelerate and adjust the turning potion to make the breakthrough. It is the moment when the business conducts change more radically, explore new opportunities more aggressively and expedite for rising to the new heights relentlessly. Speeding up implies to orchestrate digital transformation in a synchronous way. The goal is to accelerate changes, but not rush up for catching only short time gains, and strike the right balance of digital speed and stability, quick wins and long-term business results.

Self-renewing: Digital organizations are like the living systems that can self-renew in striving to become high-performance businesses. Digital is the new age paradigm associated with deep ecology - the digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. To self-renew and create a positive change tomorrow, you need to start today understanding self. How can you prepare for making positive changes? And how can you continue innovating for the community to thrive? There are no shortcuts to getting to that state, it takes holistic understanding, fluid structure, and a real commitment to getting there. High mature digital business can provide a more intensive and creative working environment enabling the organization to get all the right people with the right capability in the right position to solve the right problems from right angles all at once, and ultimately achieve high-performance business results and maximize the full digital potential. Digital organizations need to emphasize participation, relationships, communication, and realize that organizations will need to renew themselves periodically to cope effectively with change and have a fluid structure that responds adequately and makes an impact on the hyperconnected digital ecosystem significantly.

Businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work to build an authentic culture and an engaging workforce, take the logical steps for reaching the next stage of business maturity which means business effectiveness, responsiveness, performance, intelligence, innovation, and people-centricity. Digitalization is a continuous journey with iterative steps. Don’t rest until you’ve done everything you can do to make your organization as resilient, inventive, inspiring, and accountable as it can be.

Posted in: Digital Maturity,Digitalization