Sunday, March 17, 2019

Three Pitfalls on the Path of Going Digital

At the high maturity level, organizations understand that digital business development is multifaceted and have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation.

Forward-thinking organizations are on the journey of digital transformation which represents the next stage of business growth and organizational maturity. The perspective of change unfolds into a wider multi-dimensionally systemic business continuum, which will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its digital ecosystem, with people at the center of its focus. However, for many organizations, it will be the bumpy road with numerous barriers and many hidden pitfalls from doing digital to going digital.



Lack of strategic priority: Digital transformation is the large scale of change which needs to be stretched up in multiple directions. However, the organization has finite resources to apply to get the best yield possible to meet stakeholders’ expectation. There are always some constraints for businesses to balance a healthy portfolio of “running, growing, and transforming.” Often, lack of the strategic focus or a clear understanding of what the priority needs to be is one of the pitfalls of going digital. You cannot think in terms of single thread serial actions alone nor can one give undue priority to areas that are covered by the tactical implementation of the strategy. Organizational leaders do not set priority in a vacuum. Rather, they should leverage the enterprise’s strategy and business objectives to prioritize effectively. There is no way to create a definitive prioritized list without business context. The right answer about the highest strategic priority depends on which of the business areas are most in need of improvement in the organization to ensure seamless strategy management. The challenge is to prioritize what you know about and keep an eye open for signs of things you don't know about. There’s insight underneath and there’s foresight ahead of the current circumstances. Embedding prioritization mechanism into decision and performance management is about how to take a structural approach to define strategic goals and cascading them out to frontline teams, apply tailored methodologies and personnel to motivate change and make a measurable improvement.

Push change via technology provision only: Change should be viewed as an "opportunity" for solving business problems, improving business productivity, delighting customers, cutting costs or optimizing products/services/processes. It’s not just about technology update. Technology is the means to end, not the end itself. When you push change via technology provision only, change without good reason and adding value is futile and useless. Change happens when changing is easier than maintaining the status quo and, more importantly, when people no longer feel threatened by it. To drive digital transformation, change leaders need to invoke further reflections of the focal scope and purpose of changes, as well as the generic perspective of running a digital business. It's about creating a better business value proposition, successful operating system, and business culture that delights customers, engage employees and makes a step change difference in the way and quality that we do business and reward various stakeholders. Digital technologies are the digital catalyst and change vehicle. Thus, organizations should become more aggressively leverage information, advanced digital technologies, platforms, and tools to enforce cross-functional communication and collaboration and make change happening at the right speed.


Fail to build cohesive and differentiated business competencies such as changeability or innovation: Doing digital is perhaps about taking a few change initiatives or adopting some latest technologies. However, going digital takes a structural approach and needs to build a cohesive set of business competencies. Digital management is fundamentally an iterative cycle to plan, design, build, scale and optimize business competencies to achieve the desired effect under specified performance standards and conditions. It is important to identify capability gaps, assess capability maturity, and develop the target state capabilities for transformational changes. By assessing the maturity level of business capabilities, the management readily considers service, process, information, asset, people, etc, dimensions of the adequacy of the capability to fulfill their goals to change. Actually, the business differentiation provided by unique capabilities can better shape the business as a leader in the industry than differentiation provided by marketing actions that can be copied easily. Building business competency intends to improve the whole rather than the part of the organization. The right set of scalable, integral, coherent and differentiated business capabilities directly contribute to the organizational maturity and make a significant impact on business success in the long run.

At the high maturity level, organizations understand that digital business development is multifaceted and have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation. By overcoming fatal pitfalls, organizations are well prepared to effectively and efficiently absorb and accept changes in all its forms and take high-quality efforts to enable organizations thriving.

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