Heralding an Ecological Digital Organization

Digital organizations today need to redefine themselves to ensure information fluidity, brand reputation, and people-centricity. 

Digitalization makes a profound impact from a specific function to the business as a whole, building an organization of the future is not too far away. Digital organizations are hyperconnected and interdependent. They need to have an in-depth understanding of gains and pains of organizational design and development. They should also renew themselves periodically to cope with the change effectively to the best of their ability. Heralding an ecological digital organization need to emphasize participation, relationships, communication, and collaboration and unlock business performance and potential continually.

Sharing a clear vision and maintain strong adherence of the business brand: With an unprecedented level of uncertainty and velocity, business leaders try to predict and plan for the future by envisioning and applying a range of techniques. The vision needs to be 'the guiding light' so that people can see themselves and their work reflected in it. Digital leaders need to be constantly visible by sharing their vision and enabling others to share it as well. With a clear vision, they can also craft a good strategy. Corporate branding is actually an important component of business strategy management. A typical brand value-chain includes such activities as identifying what the brand stands for, how the company wants its stakeholders to see and perceive the brand name, the connotation it wants its stakeholders to associate to, and the primary activities through which the brand name gets communicated. For the successful digital business branding, business leaders should maintain strong adherence of the business brand by asking themselves: Is “what we look” consistent upon “who we are”? What are we trying to accomplish? Are we on the right path? Etc. Your goals and objectives will be your drivers. Your strengths and weaknesses will be your constraints. Digitalization has erased the line between business brand and talent brand, as they are two sides of the same coin now. A company's brand is one of its most valuable assets. it’s important to reformulate principles, develop the strategy, restructure the organization and present a new value proposition.

Tuning the organizational structure from a rigid hierarchy to flatter and fluid space for changes: In the industrial age, most of the organizations are running at silos, with the top down organizational structure and overly restricted hierarchy which slows down the speed of changes. The powerful digital technologies and tools now play a critical role in breaking of silo paradigms and loosening overly restricted structure. Flatter structures will help to speed up organizational response to changing markets. The traditional hierarchical lines will phase out and a collective of business partners will emerge working collaboratively to set and achieve organizational goals. Tuning organizational structure, either managerial hierarchy or information flow structure needs to become the common practices to keep digital fit. To make change smoothly, the digital organizational structure should be solid enough to give some sort of forms or meanings and open enough to its environment and allow the movement of people, ideas and information frictionlessly. The digital workplace is fluid, live, informative, creative and productive. If you're a manager, you should think holistically, leverage the latest digital collaboration platforms and tools to improve communication and collaboration, change the structure by changing the way of working, tasks, roles, and responsibilities, etc. The hyperconnected and interdependent digital ecosystem needs to communicate, negotiate, and cooperate with each other to catalyzing changes and fostering innovation.

Shift machine based clockwork to an autonomous adaptive digital workforce: In the Digital Era, the mechanistic work production analog is replaced with organic growth metaphor. Operational centrism becomes multi-disciplinary people-centrism. The "work is what you accomplish, not where you go;" learning-working are not linear steps, but an iterative business continuum. Digital learning is multidimensional, dynamic, interactive, informal and integrated. Self-empowered employees and teams catalyze changes. The future of work will be shaped by changes that take place in the way people relate to themselves and to their experience of their environment and others around them, which will lead to greater autonomy and "self-generated" engagement.  Being a digital professional means consistency; does not rely on authority, operates from a personal belief in their own sense of things. It’s more about the consistent image you deliver for being who you are or the mentality you have in or out of working hours. It becomes a life attitude. Having an empowered workforce that is able to respond to changing conditions and using their own initiative can truly make the business nimbler. Building an ideal digital workforce won’t happen overnight, it takes planning, experimenting and scaling up.

The unprecedented opportunities brought by digital technologies and abundant information can lift up a fast growing business promptly, but the inevitable digital disruptions can ruin the brand image of a well-established organization almost overnight. Digital organizations today need to redefine themselves to ensure information fluidity, brand reputation, and people-centricity. The digital organization is a self-adaptive system which is able to re-configure its own structure and change its own behavior during the execution of its adaptation to continuous environmental changes in striving as the digital master.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization,Organizational structure tuning