How to Achieve Digital Coherence

Consider digital organization as the coherent, self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem.

Coherence is simply about logic and consistency. The digital coherence is the decisive factor for the success of strategy implementation and how well organizations can take the step-wise approach to make the digital transformation, continual renewal, deliver the value to the customers consistently and build a long-term winning position of the business.

Information Management coherence: Information and its lifecycle are complex but critical for running a high-intelligent digital business. With the abundance of information, IT can process and refine information to provide businesses real-time insight across the organization in ways never possible before. Information Management coherence directly impacts on decision effectiveness and strategic coherence. The business needs to know what IT can deliver and enter a dialogue about what best serves the goals of the business. As now information is one of the most time-intensive pieces of digital innovation, businesses have high expectation of IT to become a driver of change and innovation and deliver high-level business value consistently. IT function needs to be responsive, flexible, and coherent to synchronize with core business activities and create digital synergy. Information is the lifeblood of the enterprise, but if not properly managed, it becomes at worst case a liability and at best case an underutilized asset. Therefore, to run a smart business, it’s important to utilize technology, leverage information, set governance rules on information management to bridge IT-business chasms and improve the overall business maturity.

Change Coherence: Digital means increasing pace of change and continuous digital disruptions. Change shouldn’t be just some random business initiatives, it has to become a coherent business competency. Change is a dance between the top management and the affected parts of the organization. Change Management is all about balancing the main elements impacting change such as people, strategies, processes/ procedures and IT. People-centric change capability is different from the mere sum of individual abilities and skills of its members. Change coherence is achieved via identifying change gaps, sourcing the mix set of skills and capabilities, identifying change agents and specialists, and tuning business processes and structures to deliver the desired changeability. The key trait is credibility at every level of organizations. Digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes via self-adaptability, self-renewal, and maintaining the digital balance. Digital change management is about discovering the ways of combining the freedom and flexibility of self-management with the control and coordination of traditional hierarchies. A high mature digital organization is a self-adaptive system which is able to reconfigure its own structure and change its own behavior during the execution of its adaptation to environmental changes. The coherent people-centric change management capability is built via the top executive generous sponsorship, the middle-management dedicated execution, and the bottom line engagement and fully supports.

Performance management coherence: To manage performance coherently, the logical scenario to manage performance includes making a fair assessment and gets objective perspectives on what you are trying to manage. Can you reduce the performance drag of top-heavy management structures without giving anything up in terms of focus and efficiency? Enterprise Performance Management methods include strategy maps, process management, people management, quality management, scorecards, customer profitability analysis using activity-based costing principles, customer intelligence, etc. Enterprise Performance Management integrates them as a large umbrella. Performance management is not an isolated management discipline. Performance management coherence is achieved via connecting multidisciplinary management dots to tell the full story with business context, to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. All company’s performance is directly related to the decisions people make every day, organizations need to define the set of measures that help it make informed decisions across the organizational scope consistently. It is also critical to take logical steps for implementing business goals from top-level executives to the front-line workers, across functional areas and geographical regions.

Consider digital organization as the coherent, self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem. Organizations "become complex," not for their own amusement, they do it to respond to environments more proactively; processes underpin business capabilities, and culture nurtures capability coherence. It’s important to understand what drives cost and what drives value, ensure they have both vision and passion, coherent capabilities and capacities entering into the ever-changing business dynamic.

Posted in: Change Management,Digital Master,Digitalization