Develop Digital Literacy Across the Enterprise

Digital literacy is not about reading and writing; but about how skillfully you can swim in the sea of information to update knowledge and how fluently you can connect the interdisciplinary dots to spark creativity. 

 With evolutionary digital technologies and overwhelming growth of information, digital literacy is the ability to effectively navigate, create, and evaluate information by leveraging a range of digital technologies for gaining business insight and making leadership influence. From the management perspective, it is a strategic imperative to develop digital literacy across the enterprise, and know how to amplify the multitude of digital effects for making the seamless digital paradigm shift.


Digital mind crafting: Developing digital literacy starts with the digital mind crafting. In the digital era which represents the rapid change, with “VUCA” digital characteristics, change is not possible unless we are willing to craft a growth mindset. To bring in the radical change, there needs to be a paradigm shift - a mind shift. The mind is something very personal, it is a label that individuals create for the awareness that is on their own. Great digital leaders and professionals are equipped with multidimensional thinking, high quality thought processes, sustain a balance of diversified viewpoints, creativity, and empathetic understanding for solving either existing or emerging problems. With rapid change and information growth, it requires that we move from mindset to mind flow; from fixed mind to growth mind, from thinking conventionally and convenience to thinking consequence, thinking forward with the long-term perspective.

Interdisciplinary knowledge sharing: Digital organizations and systems have the characteristics of nonlinearity, adaptability, unrepeatability, unpredictability, and denial of control. At an enterprise level, digital literacy requires cross-functional collaboration and interdisciplinary knowledge sharing. Information nowadays is only a click away and the knowledge cycle is shortened significantly. The border of knowledge domains has a blurred scope, and knowledge is expanded in the continual base. Thus, organizations today need to have an integral information and knowledge management approach, encourage interdisciplinary knowledge sharing, knowledge transfer allows people to understand new topics and get access to knowledge effortlessly. As outdated knowledge will stifle innovation and decelerate business progress both individually and collectively. The linear management practices are simply not sufficient to manage the “VUCA” digital new normal. In the digital era, we will be confronting a number of high-complex problems in the hyper-connected world, the business solutions will require an integration of different sets of knowledge and digital fluency across multiple disciplines. The interdisciplinary knowledge and science can be applied to digital management which involves engineering, design, principles, philosophy, psychology, social norms, and sociology.

Organizational-wide competency: Organizations today need to constantly improve the business and seeing change as an opportunity while keeping a holistic overview of the business are the core messages of the text. One of the very goals of developing digital literacy across the enterprise is to build the organizational wide competency, to work across business disciplines for solving complex problems by having a contextual understanding and taking a systematic approach. In today’s business dynamic, digital capabilities are a fundamental building block in digital transformations with which companies can achieve operational excellence, create a new business model, and accelerate business performance and growth, to reach the high-level business maturity.

Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. Developing digital literacy across the enterprise and keeping the digital fit mean that organizations shouldn’t just respond to changes in a reactive way, but proactively accumulate knowledge, gain business insight, bring greater awareness of intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, business competency, people dynamics, resource alignment, and technology touch, to re-focus, kickstart or 'game-changer,' for managing a digital paradigm shift effortlessly.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization