Saturday, April 28, 2018

Accelerating Digital By Taking a Strategic Pathway

 if you are not different, you are a commodity. This is the foundation on which brands are built.

The shift to digital paradigm cuts across sectors, geographies and leadership roles, the digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves and reimagine the “art of possible.” Still, for most organizations, from doing digital to going digital and being digital is the bumpy road. There are numerous barriers and pitfalls on the way, how to take a strategic pathway for enabling digital flow and accelerating performance?



Dynamic planning: As the saying goes, plan is nothing, and planning is everything. This is especially true due to the increasing speed of changes and continuous disruptions. A business plan provides direction, diagnose issues, and outlines the preferred course of action. But with today’s business velocity and frequent digital disruptions, if planned in detail as far ahead as the end state, much planning time and effort will be wasted. It is important to evolve emergent property and make the proper adjustment accordingly. Strategic planning deals with horizontal scanning environmental and social monitoring, distributed sensing capability and knowing what to look for, how to set guidelines when to make choices, and it is a natural extension of scenario planning. Digital strategic management is both system and process to deal with dynamic and iterative planning and execution continuum. The frameworks of thoughts, consciousness and maturity assessments apply to strategy, then, now and in the future. Strategic thinking is the system thinking in the new boxes whereas strategic planning and execution within which risk management aligns planning with execution, are the process of strategic management. Strategic thinking and planning mean change and people don't like change. From the business management perspective, establishing the strategic discipline based on critical reasoning will get people to move their thinking from operation to strategy and will get the whole organization to understand the importance of strategy over the operation or, at least, become aware of what is one, what is the other and what is a stake when compromising. Translating strategic intent into meaningful action and making the needed changes stick can be difficult, doing it frequently and at a fast pace, even more so, but worth the effort,

Strategic alignment: It means how to translate strategy into operational activities aligning the organization to create synergies in making strategy everyone’s daily work and a continual process mobilizing change through digital synchronization. The business units determine action items from these goals and these action items become the goals of the departments within each business unit. Strategic alignment and synchronization can catalyze the flow of the right information to the right people at the right time to coordinate and execute strategy, tactics, and risks. And so on, until each individual manager or supervisor has a goal, with action items and opposing metrics. Strategy-execution synchronization can also catalyze the flow of the right information to the right people at the right time to coordinate and execute strategy, tactics, and risks. One of the primary impediments to strategic alignment is a dissonance between upper and middle management and a similar dissonance between middle management and the bottom line. That means to translate strategy into operational terms aligning the organization to create synergies in making strategy everyone’s everyday job and a continual process mobilizing change through digital synchronization. Digital is the age of people, assuming the company has a great product, creating meaningful, relevant, and compelling differentiation in the mind of customers is the challenge. Only by aligning the outside view with the inside view, can you understand the needs of people but also the channels needed to support them. Thus, strategic alignment also means that making a shift from traditional IT-business alignment to IT-customer alignment to understand customers with empathy and capturing the people-centric trend,

Strategic differentiation: Organizations are different, they have different cultures, different structures, they compete in different markets, they have a different scale. Digital businesses are becoming complex and uncertain, to survive and thrive. Every competitive business has a unique set of key capabilities, with often described characteristics such as robustness, flexibility, innovation, speed, comprehensiveness, responsiveness, agility, improvement, sensitivity, optimization, resilience, etc, to achieve its business goals and reach a high level of performance. A core competency is a harmonization of multiple capabilities such that it permeates the entire organization with a focus, and in alignment with the resource-based view. The characteristics of digital business are dynamic, volatile, uncertain, and hypercompetitive. Therefore, it is also critical to build dynamic capabilities to adapt to changes. The dynamic capability will further build the organization’s strengths in core areas and differentiated competency. A coherent company has a deliberately close alignment among the company’s strategic direction, its most distinctive capabilities, and most or all of its products and services, to execute capability-based strategy. Strategic differentiation occurs when all parts of the choir sing their respective parts in harmony to achieve a higher purpose and make a unique impact, the music as a symphony of voice.

Digital transformation is worth its weight because of its high impact on optimizing the business performance, building differentiated business competency, and driving the business’s long-term prosperity. if you are not different, you are a commodity. This is the foundation on which brands are built. This is the strategy that "helps" to protect the brand and products from the low-priced competition. Going digital takes the strategic approach, multifaceted management disciplines and structural procedure to drilling down the critical success factors that underpin each of the higher level performance dimension.

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