Monday, July 30, 2018

Five Digital Themes of High Mature Digital Organization

The high mature digital organization is complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly.

With increasing speed of changes and exponential growth of information, today’s companies need to be organized in running with quantum speed. It means that the organizations have to embed digital across the organization, expand to every dimension of the company, to emphasize communication, participation, relationships, and realize that they have to renew themselves periodically to cope with change effectively. Here are the five digital themes of the high mature digital organization.


Informative: Information is the golden thread of the digital organization. Information abundance brings about fresh business ideas which generate the business value and achieve the long-term business success. Ideas generate lots of information, Information & Technology are the backbones of the modern business, for storing, processing, and refining information to capture the business insight. Thus, the value of information must be qualitative, measurable, and defined uniquely by an organization in order to run a highly informative organization. Digital organizations need to take an integral approach to manage their information and knowledge. A well-designed and relatively simplified information/knowledge solutions bound to unlock the enterprise knowledge, to turn a downward (cost efficiency) spiral into an upward (business growth) spiral. You need to not only assimilate the existing knowledge, more importantly, but you should also keep updating knowledge as well, create new knowledge, and turn the business as the knowledge and idea hub to benefit the business growth and societal advancement. The epistemic value of information/ knowledge management is to develop the knowledge workforce and build the culture of learning and innovation.

Autonomous: Digital is the age of people-centricity. Running a self-autonomous organization is about empowerment and trust, with the ultimate goal to improve business efficiency, effectiveness, flexibility, and performance. Consider nature and culture as to self-organized and interlaced environments, teams naturally gravitate towards self-organization. The high degree of the team’s self-management capability reflects its maturity to be disciplined enough to do the work in a dynamic and highly innovative environment. A self-disciplined and high-performance team is often composed of many self-motivated people who can take the personal drive and focus on performing well in new and changing context, the selection of roles is done automatically and naturally. The motivational digital leaders can both motivate themselves and others to do the work, align their career goals with the strategic goal of the organization. They allow people to develop their talent and skills by giving them the time and confidence to work out for themselves what needs to be done in the certain situation, accelerate performance and unlock the potential in order to reach the next growth cycle. It is also important to create the right organizational culture, where people can take ownership of their processes and believe better-than-expected results.

Collaborative: Digital organizations are hyperconnected and interdependent, digital leaders today must be able to foster a workplace that thrives on cross-functional communication, collaboration, and social interaction in building business competency. The opposite of collaboration is the silo, silos are the method of containment and storage, bounded group or insular tribes are evidence of silos. Silos are the reservoirs for homogeneous thinking, impeding creativity and decrease decision-making effectiveness. It is imperative that we be willing to seek out help, break down silos. With over-complex business dynamic, cross-silo collaboration is critical to solve business problems and build dynamic digital capability. Take a logical scenario to develop a highly collaborative business environment. Define and implement collaboration tools to be used. Designate duties or accept the duties assigned. The increasingly virtual and dispersed nature of organizations and the growing workforce of employees receptive to the emergent technologies are two factors redefining collaboration practices both within the enterprise and with external stakeholders. Highly collaborative organizations are more productive, competitive, and innovative in either solving difficult business problems effortlessly or achieving strategic business goals successfully.

Innovative: Digital is the age of innovation. The highly innovative digital organizations, no matter large or small, are highly dynamic and flexible, focus on problem-solving, no about overly restricted hierarchy. Innovation becomes simply creating value by solving simple and complex problems. In practice, there are idea gap, process gap, and innovation execution gap in innovation management. To run an innovative organization, the more difficult challenge is not just launching successful teams, but maintaining their motivation and focus. Being innovative is a mindset, it means to show constructive dissatisfaction, understand the risks and potential bear traps. The art and science of innovation are about how to use the diversity of ideas as a rich source of connectivity and relationship, to harness all spontaneity of interaction the group is capable of and provoke breakthrough thinking to achieve creative outcomes that would be otherwise very unlikely, to reach the stage of ideaphoria.

Inclusive: Building an inclusive organization means that the cognitive differences and diverse viewpoints are embraced. It is important for building a creative team having people who do not have the same viewpoint of varying issues so that they can complement with each other’s viewpoint. By generating scenarios where there is no one solution to a problem, but there are always alternative ways to do things. Orient people and make them aware of the diversity in their organization or team, help them understand the value of harnessing the differences, and then giving them the tools and experience of how to effectively communicate, collaborate, build trust, and develop a creative team to reap the benefit. In fact, diversity is not an idea. It is not something you need to plan for. It is a basic reality of the modern world that needs to be better understood. Thus, the business leaders must work with the right mindset to create an inclusive organization with every dip in the business lifecycle.

The high mature digital organization is complex enough to act intelligently and nimble enough to adapt to changes promptly. It is highly inclusive and collaborative to overcome common challenges. The part of the digital journey is to share a clear vision, prepare people for the digital new normal to recognize increasingly collective consciousness, and build dynamic business competency woven by people, process, and technologies, in order to master the change and achieve high-performance business results with continuous delivery.

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