Sunday, November 10, 2019

Five Practices to Leap Digital Maturity

Businesses across industrial sectors embark on the “digital era” of computing and managing by taking logical but iterative steps and developing their best and next practice. 

The journey of digital transformation is the full-scale changes in the way business is conducted so that it’s a multidimensional planning and orchestration. It is necessary for the coherent use of various already known concepts and gradually opening up to the best and next practices for enforcing digital processes and sharpening all crucial business success factors to get digital ready.

Disrupt existing management norm: Organizations today are the business system with a mixed bag of old and new, solid and fluid, physical and virtual. To make a leap of the digital maturity of the organization, it’s critical to disrupt the outdated mindsets, systems, processes, cultures, business models, or practices.

When a system produces "bad" side-effects, you need to intervene. For example, when organizations only seek examples to follow, rather than develop their own tailored solutions to emerging or existing problems, you know some simulations are needed to first disrupt, then reconstruct, and integrate all critical business elements into premium business solutions. When people are not working via the system to solve real problems but play the system to create frictions or when systems beat good people every time, you know the systems are bad. You acknowledge that the system is dysfunctional and creative disruptions are inevitable for awakening digital consciousness, and make a smooth transformation from silo and closed business system to cognitively open, hyperconnected and intraactive ecological systems.

Creative disruption can lead to digital breakthrough. With all necessary breakdown, you will get very great chances and opportunities to change your organization in many fields and lift up the organization to the next cycle of growth and maturity.

Remove the barriers to change initiatives: Change is inevitable, and Change Management becomes a common practice within an organization, Digital enterprises are inherently complicated, the highly intensive changes do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways, but act as a complex system feeding, amplifying and ameliorating change effects.

Statistically, more than two-thirds of change efforts fail to achieve the expected results. The barriers to change are varying, such as, lack of executive sponsorship and management accountability. Change for its own sake - not investing enough time to discover the root cause of issues; or the lack of recognition for change impacts individuals and businesses’ willingness to extend themselves again for the next change, etc.

To remove the barriers to change initiatives, the executive sponsor and change team manage timely or regular follow-up which is an absolute must. To change an organizational system, you must understand the concept of the true meaning of the nonlinear organizational dynamic. Change Management is no longer an isolated activity or one time business initiative but an iterative business continuum.

Stretch innovation space and horizon: Digital is the era of innovation. Without innovation, without collective human progress. There are all sorts of innovation and different flavors of digital innovation. Innovation is risky and most companies want to minimize risk versus taking intelligent risks.

To expand innovation horizon and stretch innovation space, organizations depend heavily on their technological knowledge and market capabilities to experiment, learn and innovate. Thus, at the organizational level, having innovation curve awareness means that innovation leaders should create a sense of urgency to stretch up, have a bigger innovation appetite, need to understand and rise above the learning curves, systematically develop the capability to implement innovation successfully, including the effort to scale innovation and amplify innovation impact. And that is something you do not accomplish overnight.

Unlock the growth potential of the business: Performance keeps the business lights on, but potentiality can lift up the business to the next cycle of growth. Business potential includes the overall organizational abilities to perform in the future by discovering their strengths and building core competencies. A high potential organization can grow, innovate and transform by taking a systematic approach to identify and develop potentiality into a more solid form and transform it into differentiated business advantage. Unleashing business potential is a strategic effort either at the individual or the business level. Therefore, it is important for the organization to identify how information is associated with the valued tangibles of businesses; products and resources. Sometimes, you even need to leverage all tradeoffs, retreat today’s performance a step back in order to accelerate the future performance.

Develop dynamic core business competencies: The characteristics of digital business are dynamic, volatile, uncertain, and hypercompetitive. Business capabilities are often the collective and amplified capabilities of its people; business processes underpin organizational capabilities. Therefore, it is critical to build dynamic capabilities to adapt to changes, build the business strengths in core areas and build differentiated competencies. 

To shorten the time cycle and save the cost for building business capabilities, the high mature digital businesses needs to preserve core competency even as management expands and redefines the business. Organizational capabilities have business outcomes; they collaborate with each other and are enabled by processes to integrate into differentiated business competencies. It is important to identify the key business capability and make an objective assessment of capability maturity, also hone them into the organization-wide competency for achieving its business strategy and building its reputation and brand in the industry or business ecosystem,

Businesses across industrial sectors embark on the “digital era” of computing and managing by taking logical but iterative steps and developing their best and next practice. The journey of improving business maturity is more evolutionary than revolutionary because digital transformation discipline is not just about some stand-alone initiatives, it requires a vision and a solid strategy to transform radically.