Debunk the Myth of Digital Business Ecosystem

Understanding the people and the organization through an ecosystem lens makes it possible to allow the organization exploring digital in all directions.

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. A high mature digital organization can bring greater awareness of the intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, business competency, people dynamics, resource alignment, information permeation, and technological touches with ecosystem perspective. The digital ecosystem is dynamic, hyper-connected, expansive, and interdependent. It provides unprecedented opportunities to strike a dynamic balance between the inner and outer business elements; it expands when the components of the business system consume all sorts of resources and broaden their scope of influence. There are known known, known unknown, and unknown unknown. How to debunk the myth of digital business ecosystem and leapfrog the business to the next level of the organizational growth and maturity?

Understand and adapt to the digital ecosystem: The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but also permeating cross industrial boundaries. Forward-thinking companies across the vertical sectors claim they are in the information technology business. The organization nowadays is like the switch connected to the dynamic ecosystem which keeps evolving and expanding. It’s like the self-adaptive system which is able to re-configure its own structure and change its own behavior pattern during strategy execution by adapting to environmental changes and managing risks. The organization becomes "unconscious" when it is no longer responding to the external environment and it’s seemingly detached from their business ecosystem. To effectively respond to the new dynamic, the organization need to awaken the ecosystem consciousness, start thinking about ways for adapting to their ecosystems and create new revenue streams while becoming highly responsive and innovative. The ecosystem partners need to communicate, participate, negotiate, and cooperate with each other to reinvent a super-conscious business.

Make the ecosystem alignment: With the ecosystem consciousness, business resources should be managed at the level of the ecosystem, rather than managing as individual pieces, to improve business effectiveness and maturity. It’s also important to align the different parts of the ecosystem to integrate modular, layered, and industrial components into loosely coupled dynamic business competency. It accelerates the business speed to deliver products or services and responds to the marketing dynamic by combining the modular capabilities exposed in a platform to create new experiences and business competencies. Because loose coupling makes it possible to change the components without affecting the system, as long as the interface is kept stable. Instead of being rigidly grouped around a specific business, ecosystems draw together mutually supportive companies from multiple industries that build strategic partnership, make resource alignment, and collectively seek to create differentiated offerings and capture value they could not reach alone. The dynamic ecosystem explicitly seeks to create a flexible environment in which people can grow, treat customers, channel partners, suppliers as industry ecosystem participants to create and co-solve tough problems and many common challenges.

Purposefully plan the ecosystem: Companies operate within ecosystems to deliver value to their customers. For many organizations, the ecosystems have evolved without much attention or planning. To succeed in today's digital dynamic in the long term, the most successful organizations have a very clear vision and understand of why they exist, the value they bring to customers and the very reason for changes. It’s important to begin thinking about ways for broadening their ecosystems and revenue streams while becoming more responsive. More specifically, to reach the high level of ecosystem consciousness. first, the ecosystem needs to be understood, then, it needs to be well planned, and also needs to be thoughtfully renewed as well. Companies today need to understand the dynamic competitive landscape, proactively look for ecosystem partners that can help the business succeed, orchestrate a broader ecosystem beyond functional or business borders, and demonstrate the benefits to the ecosystem in ways that might have happened in the past but at a much faster rate with much broader impact in the digital era.

Organizations arise when the scale of the interrelations or interactions surpasses the individual’s capacity to be able to do whatever it does with smaller scales. Understanding the people and the organization through an ecosystem lens makes it possible to allow the organization exploring digital in all directions, develop the company as a living thing, and perceive the business through multidimensional perspectives, such as the lenses of technology, sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, organizational and communication sciences, etc, understand, adapt to, and purposefully plan and orchestrate a hyper-connected and interdependent digital ecosystem seamlessly.

Posted in: Complexity,Digital Master,Digitalization