Three System Pillars in Building an Intersecting and Interacting Digital Organization

Being digital takes multidimensional expansion and multifaceted management disciplines.

Digital is the new paradigm shift to deeply connect the business with the natural ecosystem, which is a community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their environment. Digitalization makes the business flatter and the world smaller because of its very characteristics of hyper-connectivity and interdependence. The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of the organization which consists of the follow three types of intersecting and interacting systems:

Technical systems: Technology is often the disruptive force behind digitalization. Today’s technology enables companies to leverage their various environments, or ecosystems, to chase innovation, unlock potential, and accelerate performance. Never before has IT and business been so closely tied together, never before has the lightweight digital technology moved more quickly and missteps have larger trajectory impacts on every aspect of the business. The emergent digital technologies blur the functional, business, and geographical territories. Information and technology are the linchpins to bridge the functional silos as well as connect the organization to the digital ecosystem that is capable of supporting both widespread incremental innovation in products/services and ways of working as well as the rarer breakthrough' innovation in products/services, methodology, business model, and market positioning. The highly effective corporations need to embed the power of information in its fiber to weave business competencies, to ensure it is part of its digital mechanism and process to improve business responsiveness and innovation.

Sociological systems: Sociology brings much more depth to our knowledge with the interdisciplinary understanding of the modern business and contemporary human society. With emerging digital technologies such as social computing and powerful enterprise collaboration tools, today’s digital businesses are becoming more interconnected and interdependent with its macro-environment by leveraging enterprise social platforms to have engaging conversations with partners, customers, community group, and industry expertise. Today’s business leaders are capitalizing and operating on digital ecosystems that are expanding due to the confluence of sociological systems. Businesses are using social platforms and collaboration tools to brainstorm ideas, enforce multichannel communications, improve customer relationship, engage employees, monitor online customer behavior, create social communities and develop hyperconnected sociological digital systems. Companies need new ecosystem partners to pursue benefit and help the business succeed.

Cultural systems: Culture is collective mindsets. Like many other digital mindsets, an ecosystem mindset focuses on the wholeness, rather than just the sub-component. An ecosystem is living, dynamic and continually emerge with culture as its atmosphere. Culture adoption happening is like a wave. Senior Management starts the wave coming into the shore, but it then has to reach the beach (bottom) before it can go back out. Culture is collective human behaviors and habits that could be considered part of the people skills/competencies component to model a business capability. Culture is invisible, but the culture system is powerful. If your culture embraces the future, inspires others, being a customer fanatic, and then it forms the dynamic digital environment. All humans are naturally creative. Digital is the age of innovation. It is a strategic imperative to create and nurture an environment in your organization where humility is appreciated, curiosity is encouraged, and creativity is rewarded. Cultural system is an important pillar in building a high-performance and high-innovative digital organization.

High mature digital organizations are intersecting and interacting with its digital ecosystem. Being digital-ready goes beyond applying the latest technologies, it is the multidimensional expansion and takes multifaceted management disciplines. The organizations that are skilled at managing business complexity can gain advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more complicated business mix that provides opportunities to accelerate business performance and unleash its full digital potential.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization