Design a Digital Organization from Multiple System Perspectives

The high mature digital organizations are highly conscious about what’s happening in their environment, with the ability to adapt to change timely and unlock their performance continually.

Running a digital organization is to connect the old and new, mix the solid and fluid to enforce digital confluence, foster innovation, and achieve people-centricity. Organizations generally consist of varying intersecting and interacting systems. But the strictly mechanic business architecture framework perhaps do not know how to address the business and people system dynamic. How to leverage flexibility as a guiding principle to design a highly responsive, self-adaptive and high-performance digital organization from multiple systems perspectives?

Sociological design perspective: Sociology is the study of human interaction, usually within the context of organized groups, business communities, or human societies. The digital paradigm that is emerging is the sociological organization which is the “living thing.” The organization has its purpose and the people working there maintain purposes of their own. A high mature digital organization starts with a transcendent purpose that leads to design-led strategic business initiatives most fit to achieve the strategic goals of businesses. Thus, an enterprise is never going to be architected and designed like the mechanic system. People-centricity is a transcendent digital trait and the core of corporate strategy in today’s digital organizations. You have to look at the problem domain holistically and apply the “simplicity and flexibility” principles to architect and design a sociological organization and proactively plan the total enterprise ecosystem to either make a profit for shareholders or generate prosperity of constituencies. Designing a “digital fit” company as a sociological system enables the organization to morph as living conditions and capacity change, allow a better fit for the business purpose; enable employees doing their work more productively and improve customer experiences seamlessly, with the goal to reap the business benefit for the long term.

Techno-system design perspective: Information Technology is the backbone of modern business nowadays. Thus, the techno-system perspective is a critical lens to architect and design a digital organization that is a socio-technical system with people at the center and IT as the linchpin. In fact, designing a multidimensional socio-technical business system is more difficult than designing a single-dimensional "data-driven mechanistic system"; or a "data-driven mechanistic system." Applying digital technologies and embracing digital conversion is inevitable as that is now part of the deal. There are very progressive organizations in which Information Technology sparks organizational creativity, and flexibility is an essential characteristic of the business systems. Modern digital technologies bring unprecedented convenience for people to learn and work, improve their productivity, learning agility, and innovativeness. The techno-system organizational design helps to identify and blend the ways that information and technology can assist and shape the business by linking all digital aspects together to enforce the business value creation, and appreciate many excellent business attributes such as digital readiness, ownership, information fluidity, customized structure, IT-business integration, open communication, etc, to improve organizational maturity.

Cultural design perspective: In the digital era with rapid change, innovation, and people-centricity, businesses today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work to build a digital fitting culture and an engaging workforce. If you are truly interested in culture change then you need to understand how cultures evolve to dramatically accelerate the digital transformation and to increase the likelihood of sustainable change. Thus, highly proactive and social-techno-cultural business systems need to be architected and designed. It’s challenging because the radical culture and social structure changes are required to fit the business circumstances. Culture is a collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. Culture or subculture can be designed and shaped. Cultural design starts with objective observation and assessment: Do you have an “authentic” organization that encourages its people to express, grow, and become “who they are,” or do you have a “silo” organization which has many gaps and frictions and people get stuck with “we always do things like that” mentality. Then, design and shape a flexible or an innovative culture by making an alignment of both visible business factors such as people process, structure, technology and invisible success factors such as leadership, communication, etc. A company's culture, which is heavily ingrained, implicit and not directly perceptible, is also very hard to change and changes slowly if at all. Great leaders with cultural design lens ought to be concerned not only with the here and now but prayerfully with their legacy to future generations -- a better future and brighter workforce.

As our digitized world becomes hyper-connected, over-complex and interdependent, digital leaders should develop a design framework with multiple system perspectives, leverage flexibility as design principles to clearly define the future of digital business, fine-tune the varying business factors to make a seamless digital paradigm shift. The high mature digital organizations are highly conscious about what’s happening in their environment, with the ability to adapt to change timely and unlock their performance and potential continually.

Posted in: culture Master,Digital Master,Digitalization,Organizational structure tuning,Systems Wisdom,UX/CX