Building the Bona Fide Strength of Digital Business

Different organizations have different strengths, capacities, and capabilities; thus, they need to take their unique path at their own pace to go digital, stretch their strength and build a cohesive set of business competencies.

With rapid changes and overwhelming growth of information, neither business nor life is linear or static these days. The digital organization’s long-term advantage is based on its unique strength which can be built and stretched through the combination of talent, resources, processes, and technologies to perform a set of business activities and achieve high-performance business results. Here are three efforts to build the bona fide strength of the digital business.

Enforce core competency: The characteristics of digital business are dynamic, volatile, uncertain, and hypercompetitive. Every business is different, they are at a different stage of its business life cycle, they have their own unique strengths to delight customers and gain the market shares. Unlike the closed mechanic system, digital organizations are like the living system, spontaneously self-organizes, generates patterns, forms structures, initiates business activities, and above all, creates novelty over time. Organizations need to discover their “innate strength,” make an objective assessment of their business capability maturity, also hone them into unique business strength via a good alignment of reliable information, rigorous processes, flexible structures, efficient technologies, and talented people, etc. The lack of resources is often one of the barriers to building varying business capabilities. It’s critical to set up priorities, divest non-core capabilities, free up resources that can be used to and deepen core business capabilities in order to stretch the unique strength of the organization and build the sustainable business advantage for the long run.

Raise the “digital IQ of the organization”: Digital IQ is a measure of how well companies understand the value of information technology and weave it into the fabric of their organization and to stretch its strength and run a smart business. Information/Knowledge Management is the discipline with knowledge as a focus, involves the use of technologies and processes to refine invaluable business insight from abundant information, with the aim of optimizing the value that is generated, improving organization’s collective learning capabilities and building its strength. Perhaps in some organizations with low digital IQ, there seems to be the "expectation" that if you have a great business in one place and it's working ok, and then, knowledge, ideas, business solutions, and advice will easily transfer to run a great business. In reality, businesses nowadays become so complex and volatile, information and knowledge have to be facilitated and managed systematically to reach the transformational stage of the business. Knowledge is power. Knowledge informs us as to what choices are available to stretch the organizational strength. The organization needs to integrate information management and knowledge management solutions to raise the digital IQ of the business by providing information accessibility and availability, ensuring transparency and visibility, enabling trust and reliability, with the goals of running a highly intelligent and highly effective digital business.

develop workforce strength: People are the human asset and capital need to be invested wisely. The digital workforce today is technology savvy and information fluent new breed. Spot and appreciate the true talent, putting the right people with the right talent to solve the right problem is one of the most crucial management challenges these days. Either individually or collectively, leveraging the unique strength and building professional competencies for adapting to unpredictable and riding above the learning curve is critical to achieving high performance. Therefore, digital workforce planning and management have to be systematic, strategic, and innovative. Encourage staffs to discover their innate strength and improve their skill proficiency in work by managing an iterative cycle of thinking, learning and acting continuum. Often, when employees' nature talent is used, they are highly engaged and motivated to achieve higher than expected performance. Higher levels of engagement also come from recognition, feedback, growth, and opportunity. A recognition system and high visibility for all positive contributions will help in creating a culture of learning and innovation and keep developing the workforce strength and shaping business competencies. Organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension to amplify collective human capabilities; keep one eye on today’s performance and the other eye on the future performance of the business.

Different organizations have different strengths, capacities, and capabilities; thus, they need to take their unique path at their own pace to go digital, stretch their strength and build a cohesive set of business competencies, commit to transforming themselves to a high-performance digital business.

Posted in: Digital Fit,Digital Master,Enterprise Capability