Tuesday, January 1, 2019

The New Year Prediction, Priority, and Practices of Taking a Continuous Digital Journey

Organizations can reach the inflection point for change when they can synchronize and conduct change with the scale of interrelations and interactions to make the leap of digital transformation.

Change is a fact of business and life. With the new year ahead of us, are we entering the era of digital learning, inquisitiveness, openness, and exponential? Are we opening the new page of accelerating digitalization and catalyzing innovation? Gaining the perspectives of next level of digital maturity is about having a harmonized vision of overall digital management philosophy, capabilities, structures, and practices. To survive the fierce competition and thrive with the long-term business advantage involve planning, action, adjustment, and speed.

Prediction: Change is in small adaptations that tilt scales, but also in big paradigm shifts that rebuild the scales. Many organizations reach the inflection point of digitalization. Digital leaders need to make their new year prediction and keep gaining the digital awareness, ask themselves and others: What are the emerging trends from industrial, technological or economic perspectives? What needs to be done? What resources do you need to be successful? How will you measure success? Etc. To predict is to control; to co-create is to influence what you would like to bring to the table. Create a future scenario which provides a picture of the future from which you may “back-cast” to discover what decisions may be required at each stage in order to shape the vision. Digital leaders should advocate future trends, inspire and encourage their vision, propose new ideas, promote strategies, generate conviction and enthusiasm for the future of the business. Foresight with a scenario development is actually an ongoing conversation which you keep engaging in, making corrections and changes and not wedded to any particular methodology or technique.

Priority: With unprecedented uncertainty and high velocity, business executives need to keep their eyes open from signs of things they don’t know about and make the necessary strategic adjustment for adapting to the ever-changing business dynamic. The reality is that there are a lot of things that can go wrong and it is not always easy to identify what is important. The pitfall is that often the top managers haven’t done enough to set the right priority and communicate strategies thoroughly with employees. The challenge is to prioritize what you know about and keep an eye open for signs of things you don't know about. Prioritization is critical because the alternative is a land grab for resources. The objective of prioritization shouldn't be to work on only those for which you have staff, it should be to maximize what you can accomplish through creative leverage of your talent pool and business competency. Technically, to improving business maturity, organizations should embed prioritization mechanism into the multitude of management disciplines to improve organizational responsiveness. Make the continuous effort to develop, improve, and change things in a prioritized order as long as it creates a long-term business advantage and solves critical business issue timely with cost-efficiency.


Practice: Besides predicting and prioritizing, digital leaders also need to develop the best and next practices for running a frictionless digital organization. There is no “one size fits all” formula of best practices which might be different across organizations, across departments, and affiliates within an organization and can change over time. There are negative conflicts when the organization has little collaborative competency to scale up their change management effort. When they integrate, there is more potential to innovate and create differentiate business value. Organizations nowadays can leverage advanced digital platforms and collaboration tools to connect the dots across the geographical, functional, organizational, industrial, or generational boundaries. Do not underestimate the perfect digital wave of combined business integration of all of the exponential growth curves. Leading organizations are able to identify the critical spot to scale up, build teams around business capabilities rather than functions, create joint directorial responsibilities, and leverage the framework approach to scaling digital practices, for reaching the next level of business growth and organizational maturity systematically. 

Digital transformation is the ongoing journey, with the updated management philosophy and practices. New Year is the perfect time for digital leaders to predict, prioritize and practice the better ways of leading changes. They must realize that they cannot wait until there is an immediate pressing task, continuous adaptability is necessary in an ever-changing world. Organizations can reach the inflection point for change when they can synchronize and conduct change with the scale of interrelations and interactions to make the leap of digital transformation.

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