Thursday, April 30, 2020

An Organic Digital Organization with Systematic Characteristics

An organic digital organization with above systematic characteristics is able to break away from static, stale, and slow patterns, and be able to make the continuous adjustment, improve organizational responsiveness and manageability.

Compared to the traditional organization as the mechanical system to keep spinning, digital organizations today are more like the organic living system that keeps evolving and growing. To deal with today’s business challenge, System Thinking has emerged as a popular digital principle to make tough decisions and solve thorny problems.

Diversification, hyper-connectivity, nonlinearity, and interdependence, etc, are the very characteristics of the digital era, and digital organizations are organic systems with the following characteristics.


Systems have structure, defined by components and their composition: The digital paradigm is associated with deep ecology. Consider digital organizations as self-organized but interlaced systems which have their own purpose, and the processes are determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole. Digital organizations usually have both official structures and unofficial structures that co-exist antagonistically or harmoniously defined by components. The system components concerns should include such as: What do you have (people, process, artifacts), what can you achieve in the defined time frame? What element do you add in which fiscal years, and what benefit does it provide you? Etc. Business is a system, every system has its position in the hierarchy of systems. System hierarchy provides system stability and resilience. The goal of tuning the organizational design and structure is to strike the delicate balance between solid and flow and shift the overly rigid hierarchical control to a more flexible and flatter structure with abilities to interact with the expanded digital ecosystem seamlessly.

Systems may have some functions or groups of functions: The individual business units inside the organizations are called business functions with business rules and processes, etc. Functional systems are business-oriented, with the purpose to accomplish business goals and objectives. However, in many organizations at the lower-level maturity, the business is the sum of pieces, such as silo functions, incoherent processes, overly rigid hierarchy, fractal structure, or bureaucratic management style, not running as a premium whole. To improve the organizational maturity, what can be unifying is looking at each function in the enterprise as a subsystem and then finding a unified means of looking at the essence. Modern digital organizations are not just the sum of functional pieces, but an integral whole.

Systems have interconnectivity: In systems, networks, or clusters are all about business interactions and relationships. Digital business systems are not just a set of interconnected components, but a set of interwoven threads. The business management should focus on harnessing cross-functional collaboration via iterative communications, robust processes, and management innovation; managing a portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and business interdependence with the appropriate mix of business elements and maintaining the right level of digital balance.

Systems have behavior: A system can be seen to have a purpose of its own when it produces behavior that involves information or data, inputs, processing, and outputs of material, energy, etc. The digital organization system provides a more intensive and effective working environment in which staff is motivated and empowered to make behavior changes with practices to improve productivity, efficiency, or creativity, and tackle challenges from right angles all at once. Keep in mind, most of the time. behaviors are driven by attitude, attitude results from thoughts, assumptions, and preferences. To reinforce good behavior, it’s important to provide people with sufficient and updated information, navigate people through new experiences, expose them to additional data through those experiences, and do that purposefully. The key point is to understand the elements that interact with each other and build the environment to produce good behavior.

Systems have "emergent properties": “Emergent Property" means a property that emerges after a system change such as a company merger. You might use "Emergent Property" for composite system variable value that is more or less than the sum of partial system variable values or means any outcome of a system in operation. It is important for the organization to identify emergent business properties, and how information is associated with the valued tangibles of businesses; products, and resources. To create business synergy, start with a set of emergent properties and then model the system that does or could produce them, make sure the system-of-interest is defined to establish the boundary and the properties that interact with the environment enables the business to achieve the defined goals cohesively.

An organic digital organization with above systematic characteristics is able to break away from static, stale, and slow patterns, and be able to make the continuous adjustment, improve organizational responsiveness and manageability. It is a dynamic system which needs to continue evolving and adapting, bringing greater awareness of intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, resource alignment, business capabilities, people dynamics, and technological touches, etc, to accelerate performance and reach the higher level of business maturity.




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