The New Book “Digital Maturity” Introduction Chapter VII The Pitfalls in Digital Managment

Companies can be more successful in executing innovative ideas by relying less on silo functions, and more on their cross-functional collaboration and continuous improvement.


Change is inevitable, how capable the business is handling change and mastering digitalization would directly impact on the business competency. Statistically, there is a high failure rate of Change Management, more than two-thirds of business change effort fails to achieve its expectations. So, what are the big barriers and potential pitfalls which stifle changes and impede your progress in reaching the high level of digital maturity?

People are the weakest link in the business’s changes: People are the most invaluable asset of the business, but also the weakest link for either change or strategy exeuction. People with silo mentality is a common challenge for lots of organizations to make changes sustainable and ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. In essence, with silo mentality, organizations lose their collaborative advantage as they are being over managed and under led, remain disconnected, hoard knowledge and power within silos, suffer from change inertia, and do not have the competence to collaborate in the long term. Even nowadays, businesses have stepped into the hyper-connected digital world, many business managers and professionals still apply old silo management mindsets to new ways of organizing and this legacy to the old economy limits many “networked” organizations. Thus, it's important to enforce the weakest link to run a high-connected digital organization. The digital organization should be a complex, but flexible social system starting to appreciate business attributes such as readiness, ownership, creativity, integration, open communication, customized structuring, and multifaced partnerships. It is important to build a culture of learning, encourage people to get out of the comfort zone and overcome complacency in order build the capability for change.

Innovation processes and tool gap: Even you have many innovative ideas, it doesn’t guarantee innovation success due to the possible “execution” gap. When the ideas have been developed or when they are able to be applied to meet a short-term objective, and then, they should be pushed through an efficient execution process. It’s important to build innovation processes and efficient tools that enable the idea flow of generation, contribution, evaluation, selection, and execution. Bridging innovation execution gap to achieving the business objectives requires a contracted execution scenario with clear stages, performance thresholds, and decision-making parameters combined with an iterative and experiential learning process that support wide-ranging exploration at each stage. In addition, companies can be more successful in executing innovative ideas by relying less on silo functions, and more on their cross-functional collaboration, performance management, and continuous improvement.

Performance blind spots generated by dysfunctional management practices: One possible cause of the performance management pitfalls is the fact that many traditional organizations can neither set the right measures to improve business nor sufficiently measure the business value in a multidimensional way. That also means they probably wouldn’t know where to invest in new capabilities, even if the organization thought there was any value justification for making the investment. The “measurement” of productivity, not productivity itself has blind spots as well because the business manager keeps on asking employee productivity instead of focusing on getting things to work correctly. Sometimes, the selected metrics show productivity improvement, but no real business improvement achieved. Measurement becomes the end, for its own sake, and creates more blind spots, to distract businesses from implementing the strategy effectively.

The business speed can only be accelerated with a clear vision, strong focus, and distinctive capabilities. By closing all those fatal blind spots and pitfalls, an organization can be well prepared to effectively and efficiently absorb and accept changes in all its forms for running a high mature digital organization.

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The New Book Introduction: "Digital Maturity: Take a Journey of a Thousand Miles from Functioning to Delight"?

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Introduction Chapter 1 The Characteristics of Digital Organizations

The New Book Introduction Chapter 2 The Interdisciplinary Aspects of Orchestrating a Digital Business Ecosystem

The New Book "Digital Maturity" Introduction Chapter 3 Fine-Tune Organization Structures to Get Digital Ready

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Introduction Chapter 4: The Next Practices to Orchestrate Digital Paradigm Shift Seamlessly

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Chapter 5 Introduction: IT Maturity is Proportional to the Overall Business Maturity

The “Digital Maturity” BookIntroduction Chapter 6: Take a Holistic Approach to Measure Digital Transformation

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Introduction Chapter 7 The Pitfalls in Digital Managment

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Introduction Chapter 8 From “Doing Digital” to “Being Digital”

The New Book “Digital Maturity” Book Conclusion: Develop the strong Pillars to Build High-Mature Digital Organization

Posted in: Digital Maturity,Digital Pitfalls,Lessons from Failures