Taking a Platform Approach to Going Digital

Digital transformation is about hyperconnectivity and interdependence, always-on and information savvy.

Digital means the increasing speed of changes, people-centricity, hyperconnectivity, and always-on business dynamic. Going digital implies the full-scale changes, the real challenge is to understand where and how you can and should improve to get the biggest effect across the digital ecosystem. Organizations must begin thinking about ways with digital planning and leverage the platform approach to scale up and broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams to become more responsive and flexible.

Communication and knowledge sharing platform: With the exponential growth of information, rapid changes, hyper-diversity, and continuous disruptions in the digital era, managing information, knowledge, and communication become more critical than the static industrial age with information scarcity and homogeneous team setting. Digital platforms enabled by emerging technologies, efficient apps, and tools, help to break down functional silos, business hierarchy, and geographical border, allow people across the business ecosystem to share knowledge and work collaboratively for co-solving complex problems and overcoming common challenges. Digital adaptation and transformation are faster if made with the full involvement of people in organizational changes, emphasizing on communication, participation, and collaboration. The well-developed digital platform not only helps us bridge cognitive and knowledge gaps but also provide effective tools and feedback mechanism for improving organizational responsiveness. People across the organizational hierarchy can make an invaluable contribution at whatever level in the formal hierarchy they happen to be placed, and adopt the robust processes designed for harnessing communication, brainstorming novel ideas, co-creating fresh knowledge, and co-solving business problems.

Innovation and business model reinvention platform: Innovation is not just about technology, it’s about doing things better, differentiating yourself from competitors, running, growing, and transforming the business. It's about people, culture, partnership, and processes, etc. An enterprise may have more than one business, and therefore more than one business model, also keep inventing new business models. Most good ideas emerge from interactions, not single individuals. Most organizations have too many ideas. But more is not always better. Innovation Management includes policies, structures, and programs. Thus, an appropriately configured and well-built innovation platform needs to become the part of innovation management planning and implementation, to create a scalable means for sharing and building ideas throughout the enterprise, strengthen innovation efforts, enforce governance disciplines, and improve the overall innovation success rate. The effectiveness of innovation platform can be evaluated on how it helps to reduce fear and encourage creativity and idea sharing across the organization, how it will effectively leverage the diversity of thoughts to create meaningfully unique ideas, and how it will effectively leverage the power of stimulus to generate meaningfully unique ideas. As a result, innovation becomes a persistent, shared reality, even across silos and geographies.

Customer experience platform: Customer experience is the sum of many parts to delight customers. It’s the way the customer experiences the brand of the whole company, not just direct customer service interactions. Listen to customers and involve them in the innovation process to gain insight and empathy. This involves gaining a deep understanding of the motivational construct of the customer through empathy and observation with the innovator using a more inductive approach as to what the customer wants to accomplishes "next.” From an anthropological perspective, it’s important to take outside in view, identify the customers’ preference by constructing a platform from customers’ experience. Look for providing business solutions which will directly benefit the external end customers and improve business competency. It’s important to continuously collect customers’ feedback such as the information customers really use, the process customers encountering difficulties, as well as their overall experience of adopting new products or services, etc. Invite customers to participate in strategic conversations and provide invaluable feedback on how to solve their problems, brainstorm and differentiate alternative solutions between what is verbalized, what is acted out and what is technically feasible, as well as present the solid return on investment.

Digital transformation is about hyperconnectivity and interdependence, always-on and information savvy. With advances of emerging digital technologies and tools, organizations can develop cohesive business platforms, integrate business processes into differentiated organizational competencies, to scale up and take a courageous path of going digital in a structural way.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization