Thursday, January 24, 2019

Take a Holistic, Integral, and Iterative Approach to Go Digital

A digital organization can bring greater awareness of intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, capabilities, people dynamics, resource alignment, or technological touches.

We are living in a complex world where inventions, developments, and conflicts are continuously changing and that makes it impossible to have complete knowledge and understanding of many issues facing the business today. The traditional management which is based on a tacit assumption that organizations can be compared to machines as a mechanical system with efficiency driven, inside out process perhaps work in the considerably static business environment, but may not fit for the dynamic digital business with varying characteristics such as hyper-connectivity, hyper-complexity, and interdependence. Business management needs to break down silos, update their “divide and conquer” methodologies, and take a holistic, integral, and iterative approach to go digital.

Holistic management (a Greek word meaning all, whole, entire, total) is about applying Systems Thinking to manage resources: The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but also permeating cross-ecosystem. A holistic perspective is a zoom out view and works well when conceiving, defining, and deploying a problem precisely and solve it systematically and creatively. More specifically, holistic management is about applying systems thinking to manage resources, recognizing business initiatives which take a comprehensive, anticipatory, and design approach to solve problems and advance human well-being and the health of the business ecosystem. Such a dynamic ecosystem explicitly seeks to create a holistic and innovative working environment in which people can grow, and business management focuses on dynamic resources, long-term perspectives, scalable performance, and harmonized business relationship. A business ecosystem is just like the natural ecosystem. First, it needs to be understood, then, it needs to be well planned, and also needs to be thoughtfully renewed as well. The core message of applying a holistic management discipline is about constantly improving the business and seeing change as an opportunity while keeping a holistic overview of the business and evolving an ever-expanding digital ecosystem. For the majority of organizations, it is the right timing from doing digital to going digital and being digital. The key differentiation is holism.

Integrating the right systems for the right business reasons can be extremely valuable:
With emerging lightweight digital technologies and exponential growth of information, now, what we are seeing is the further extension of these earlier phases of computing. We have more computing power, greater connectivity, and huge potential empowerment of digital workforce. In fact, the impact of today’s technologies, their integration with other new technologies, seems to be more profound, especially given the concurrent ecosystem changes going on. It represents a merging of corporate and consumer capabilities within the organization. The digital convergence of devices and services are creating new business models and revenue source as most companies across industries are being forced to become the information management business. That is the journey of the digital transformation. To run a highly responsive and high-performance information-based digital business, the seamless rhythm of IT and business integration combined with the process maturity ensures information consistency, interoperability, and high ROI. In reality, though, integration can be very difficult, costly and hard to justify ROI. Each "integration" effort can spin off into a chain reaction that may not be recognized until the budget is gone. Therefore, it has to be done with a “big picture” - architecture in mind that supports business strategy and objectives such as revenue growth, process improvement, and customer satisfaction. Digital is the era of people, integrating customer experience with the business design by applying the latest digital technologies should be a critical aspect of planning and orchestrating the future of digital business with customer-centricity.


Change Management is an ongoing organizational capability and iterative business continuum: The digital transformation is the large scale change. In order to reap the success in the business transformation, a clear and dynamic digital strategy is needed with proper execution through iterative steps. Change Management is all about balancing the main business elements impacting change: People, strategy, process and IT. To make effective organizational scope changes, you have to maintain and fix any imbalance in those elements by establishing a cross-functional change management team to involving the management of different functions. Keep in mind, change management should be the stepwise and iterative multi-stepped business processes. It takes a lot of effort and resources to make change happen, and it takes even more effort and management disciplines to sustain changes. All stages must be handled with attention and proficiency to ensure change success. Nowadays, change management and strategy management often go hand in hand. Define and prioritize strategic business goals, and start implementing them step-wisely. Managing digital performance and improving business achievement as an iterative continuum means setting metrics, adjusting plans, measuring performance and understanding results dynamically.

The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. A digital organization can bring greater awareness of intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, business capabilities, people dynamics, resource alignment, or technological touches. Taking the holistic, integrated, and iterative approaches to go digital is all about striking the right balance of reaping quick wins and focusing on the long-term strategic goals, solidifying business performance and enabling digital flow

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