Sunday, March 3, 2019

Going Digital in a Structural Way

Digital leaders and professionals need to broaden their outlook, envision the bigger picture, identify emerging digital forces, develop the comprehensive framework, refine their version of digital formulas, and make "conscious" business choices all the time in order to steer a smooth digital transformation. 

The digital shift means change. It represents the next stage of business maturity which will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its ecosystem. Digital Transformation can give businesses the ability to apply real-time insights across the organization in ways never possible before. The broader you can oversee and the deeper you can perceive the holistic digital impact, the further you can reach the digital vision and the pinnacle of digital transformation. Digital organizations and systems have the characteristics of hyperconnectivity, nonlinearity, adaptability, unrepeatability, and unpredictability. How to gain a comprehensive understanding of digital forces, develop digital management frameworks, or deduct digital formulas to enable systematic macro change, and go digital in a structural way?

Digital forces: Digital transformation is inevitable. It is “pushed” by both visible forces and invisible forces, hard forces and soft forces from multiple directions. Often the emergent digital technologies with a high degree of digital convenience are imposing forces of digital disruptions and change drivers. But to amplify and sustain its impact, digital transformation has to be expanded into every dimension and permeating into underlying organizational structure and functions. Therefore, soft forces such as leadership, communication, or culture will become the key factors for the success of changes. If the business management only tries to force change manually, or only modify a few working processes to improve business efficiency, it perhaps just change some behaviors for the short term, change cannot be sustained for the long run. The hard forces of digitization are disruptive and push the organization to adapt to the dynamic environment. But the soft business forces can truly touch the mind and heart, and make change sustainable. Thus, it’s important to fine-tune “invisible” business elements for striking the right balance, take a further step and involve internalization of the “out-of-the-box” thinking and the digital conceptual model. It is also important to identify trade-offs, learn to seek divergent views before developing a convergent conclusion and make wise choices in order to go digital in a structural way.

Digital framework: A framework approach to going digital is a set of principles, methodologies or practices for managing changes or the large scale digital transformation in a structural way. Because digital transformation cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished, it has to be woven into communication, process, and action of the digital organization. The digital frameworks add value as they are implementations of the patterns to avoid having to reinvent the wheel. A well-designed management framework containing fully developed methodologies harnesses effective communication, helps to reduce business tensions, frictions, and conflicts that arise to enforce trustful business relationship and collaboration; enables systematical changes and produces business results that are reliable, repeatable and fully distinguishable. A well-developed digital framework also helps the organization embed digital culture into the very fabric of the business, manages the portfolio of relevant cross-border business competencies and organizational interdependence with an appropriate mix of important business elements, explores the digital transformation in a structural way and laser focuses on the most important things to get business digital ready.


Digital formulas: The breadth and depth of digital management include people, process, the organizational structure design, technology update, knowledge transfer, and performance evaluation. Surely there is on one size fits all formula to manage a smooth digital transformation. However, it’s important to identify patterns, share lesson learned, amplify the best practices and experiment with the next practices. Digital management is fundamentally an iterative cycle to design, build, scale and optimize business competency and achieve the desired effect under specified performance standards and conditions. The “magic digital formula” could perhaps be refined through a combination of talent, resources, processes, and technologies to perform a set of activities and achieve the high-performance business result. Digital leaders and professionals need to broaden their outlook, envision the bigger picture, identify emerging digital forces, refine their version of digital formulas, and make "conscious" business choices all the time in order to steer a smooth digital transformation. They have to learn how to leverage systems thinking, strategic reasoning, and creativity to innovate management processes and enforce multidisciplinary business practices for going digital in a structural way.

The purpose of going digital is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of achieving high performing business result and unlocking the full business potential. It is important to understand that digital transformation is multifaceted, business optimization and integration need to be done with a “big picture” - keep the business architecture in mind and make the business synchronized to ensure that every part of the organization operates in harmony to overcome barriers and make a large leap.

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