The New Book “Digital Capability: Build Lego-Like Capability into Business Competency” Chapter IV: Digital Capability Portfolio ~ Future of CIO

Friday, June 16, 2017

The New Book “Digital Capability: Build Lego-Like Capability into Business Competency” Chapter IV: Digital Capability Portfolio

11:21 PM Pearl Zhu No comments

Knowledge workforces change each day, they grow, learn, develop. Even business as a whole does.

Digital transformation represents the next stage of business maturity which will improve how the enterprise works and interact with its ecosystem, with the customer at the center of its focus, and how your business capabilities will be enabled by the latest technologies to catalyze the digital paradigm shift. To stay competitive, companies must go beyond experimenting with digital, build the solid digital capabilities, develop a differentiated business capability portfolio, and commit to transforming themselves into a highly mature digital organization.

Strategy execution capability: Strategy execution is difficult, statistically, about two-thirds to three-quarters of large organizations struggle to implement their strategies. Strategy execution doesn’t go for perfect, it’s the core business capability needs to be sharpened for improving the overall business performance and maturity. It takes commitment and discipline to stay focused on the real priorities of the business instead of being distracted by what seems to be more urgent on any given day. The key to strategy execution success is for the team to hold each member accountable for doing their part and this is where many teams fail. Business capability mapping is about measures of “importance,” “maturity,” and “performance,” attached to each capability, and mapping to strategy management. The effective way to track the achievement of strategic goals is to cascade those down throughout the organization with the use of operational KPIs. Digital strategy execution are interdependent, and they are not linear steps, but an iterative business continuum. It’s important to build the culture of collaboration to manage strategy execution effectively and efficiently.

Information Management as a core digital capability: Nowadays, organizations large or small handle an enormous amount of data, information simply becomes the lifeblood of digital businesses. Information Management is all about having the right people to have the right information to make right decisions at the right time. Information Management is, in fact, becoming the core digital capability of the business. Unleash information potential is to unleash the full potential of the digital business. And Information potential directly impacts the growth potential of the organization. Further, information brings about business ideas, business ideas generate lots of information. And organizations can harness the power of information to provide the emergent business trends and leap the organization to the next level of business growth cycle and organizational maturity.

Learning capability of the organization: The exponential growth of information is one of the most important characteristics of the digital era, In the digital new normal with "VUCA" characteristics, the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened, digital workforce today have to learn and relearn all the time, and a collective learning capability is a strategic imperative for the company’s long-term success. Limitations on learning are barriers to the human progress. Many times the outdated knowledge become the very obstacle to pushing the world forward, and lagging mindset can only lead the business or the world backward. Without deep and continuous learning, the mind is shallow and static. Digital learning is no longer about rigid class running training, it’s multidimensional, dynamic, interactive and integrated. Learning has to become the life time habit and core organizational capability. Hence, it is important to cultivate the learning culture that has awareness and understanding the importance of continuous learning, plus setting a new behavior expectation for active knowledge participants. Knowledge workforces change each day, they grow, learn, develop. Even business as a whole does. This is an organic change and has to become the digital new normal.

We are experiencing the major societal transformation from a siloed industrial age to the hyperconnected digital era. These changes and transformations are reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we view ourselves, the systems of which we are the part. Businesses have to transform the company’s underlying functions, processes and build a unique set of digital capabilities into business competency in order to adjust to the digital speed and master the digital fluency.