Three Crucial Points of Digital Transformation

The purpose of going digital is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of business performance for the long run. 

The purpose of going digital is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of achieving high performing business result and unlocking the full potential of the organization. Digital transformation is a long journey full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. It is a thorny journey with many curves and bumps, roadblocks and pitfalls on the way. The path of going digital can be iterative, evolutionary, revolutionary, or disruptive. Here are three crucial points of digital transformation.

Design Point: Business transformation is the large scale of change, there are many factors need to be articulated such as sustainable leadership, specific shifting strategies that support a long-term vision, organizational culture, and a boatful of other dynamics. It often has to optimize underlying business functions and structures in order to improve changeability and flexibility. This is a challenge for all organizations, thus, Design Thinking turns to be a discipline with cultural, personal and strategic implications, to make change delightful and solve critical issues radically. Successful organizations see changes coming, reach design point with pre-planning and architectural framing. The organizational design should be fine-tuned to enforce responsiveness, innovation, and flexibility. The forward-thinking leaders understand how things like design thinking can fundamentally change organizations and their societal impact. To digitizing businesses, the overall design of the organization that matures itself requires very deliberate thoughts and actions, much like all stage of the business life cycle. It’s also important to discover the ways to make people feel involved in the design and implementation of changes. You need to envision the future of the business, identify core competencies and unique business capabilities for improving organizational maturity from functioning to firm to delight.

Inflection Point: Many organizations are also at the strategic inflection point of digital transformation. A strategic inflection point is a time in the life cycle of a business when its fundamentals such as people, process, technology, or culture are about to change. When the organization becomes more people-centric with satisfied customers, engaged employees and evolved business partners, it is reaching the inflection point for accelerating digital transformation. Like humans shift the life stage from an adolescent to an adult; in economics, the organization reaches the “inflection point,” in which it goes from being able to leverage systems thinking and architect’s perspective in the mind of top business leaders; and in which a greater shared understanding will lead to a big leap of business transformation by bridging capability gaps and creating business synergy. When reaching the inflection point of change, organizations can stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation with all essential dimensions to adapt to the new world of the business.

Crisis Point: With the increasing pace of changes, unprecedented complexity and “VUCA” digital new normal, an organization sooner or later will hit some crisis points in which a disruptive and unexpected event threatens to harm the organization or its stakeholders. The Greiner curve models described that there are several crisis points and multiple growths phases in the life of an organization. Crises should not be avoided or feared but work harder and smarter to overcome. At crisis points, this is when change becomes inevitable. The right attitude is to be responsive to the situation and deal with it positively and proactively. Those who cannot respond in timeframes will not be able to make an effective contribution. The discipline factor of integrating risk management into the everyday business model helps to move the organization a couple of steps forward in business excellence. The crisis point is perhaps inevitable, the great challenge is how to quantify a complex system, embed risk control mechanism into business processes, measure, manage, or model risk, embrace tools to prepare for uncertainty, make key business processes more resilient; not just control risks, but improve risk intelligence. If it has to fail, then fail faster, fail cheaper, fail forward, and recover promptly to become antifragile.

Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. The purpose of going digital is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of business performance for the long run. It is the transformation that is reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we run the business and adapt to the systems of which we are the part of the environments. It is critical to gain an in-depth understanding of those crucial points and overall digital multiplicity, to make a leap of reaching the next level or organizational maturity and human progress.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization