Reinvent Digital Organizations from Five Aspects

Going digital is an evolutionary journey with all phases of blueprinting, designing, optimizing and measuring.

The exponential growth of information and continuous disruptions bring both opportunities and risks, unique scenes and hidden pitfalls. There are competitions, conflicts, and controversies all over the place. A digital organization can bring greater awareness of the intricacies and the systemic value of organizational systems, business process, people dynamics, resource alignment, information abundance, and technological touches. But reinventing business to get digital ready is an evolutionary journey which requires much more time, energy, passion, courage, experimentation, retreat, and reflection.

Reorganizing business functions: The digital organization has an hyper-connected nature; it needs to understand the inter-dependencies, break down silo walls and utilize the human potential for continuous improvement and building a people-centric business. The goal of reorganizing business function is to make the organization more fiscally responsible, increase technical capabilities, and have a better focus to execute a business strategy. Keep in mind though, even if you have a clear goal behind such a change effort, it’s important to remember that reorganization solves some issues, but not all. Sometimes, introducing wholesale changes into any organization will create disruptions, miscommunication, and performance impact no matter how well planned the change management is. The key to success is to ensure internal communication, discussions, agreements, and collaboration to deliver on the common goal for improving the organizational responsiveness, speed, and performance,

Refining organizational process: To reinvent digital business, it’s critical for many well-established companies to make an objective assessment as the first step, realize that their systems or processes are out of date and work on updating them step-by-step. The process, technology, and capability tuning. etc, are all tactics to get the organization from here to there for adapting to the fast-paced changes and deal with complexity. The democratic processes will overtake hierarchical control, and the successful process refinement often goes hand-in-hand with organizational structure management. The process refinement should focus on improving adaptability and people-centricity, to make sure that changes are not only predicted but also fully prepared, and ensure people can have the right information and tools to get their job well done. The healthy g digital refinement cycle can create the business synergy to strive vigorously in leading business transformation.

Refocusing on dynamic strategy: A business strategy provides direction, diagnoses critical business issues, sets guidelines, and outlines the preferred course of action. However, in many companies, although the strategy looks shining or pretty, there’s no solid action to achieve it. A good strategy needs to be "shareware," not "shelfware." The challenge is that the business environment changes so fast nowadays that your strategy must be very practical and flexible. The linear strategy-execution scenario needs to be replaced by the iterative strategy-execution continuum. The point is to figure out the “right level” of planning, and keep iterating, adjusting, evolving, and working on a rhythm of sustained products or services deliveries. It is also critical to build dynamic capabilities which will further build the organization’s strengths in core areas and ensure seamless strategy execution.

Rebalancing resources: Organizations have limited resources, resource management becomes an important management discipline to improve organizational effectiveness, efficiency, performance and competency. In practice, many businesses took a big bite of resource to keep the lights on, only left very little for growth and business transformation. Resource management becomes a bottleneck for digital transformation success, no wonder these companies get stuck going nowhere. Successful capacity planning and resource management are critical to ensure that resource is available before they are needed. For any company to succeed in the long term, how resource allocation is determined should be understood by all important parties. It is essential for the entire company to be pulling in the right direction by allocating resources, time, and assets scientifically. Rebalancing resource helps the organization take advantage of resources effectively, optimize cost, manage a well-managed application portfolio, keep the business run, grow, and transform steadily,

Redirecting people to learn and achieve: With the mixed bag of new information and outdated knowledge, digital organizations and their people must learn through their interactions with the business environment continually for adapting to changes promptly. The skills that made you successful in the past may not necessarily make you succeed in the new world if you do not continue to learn, relearn, re-skill, and build the next level of capabilities. Digital workforce today has to learn and relearn all the time, and then, apply those lessons to succeed in new situations. Business management needs to redirect people to learn and achieve, with learning and doing as an iterative continuum. The organization needs to be realigned to ensure the people with the right capabilities are in the right positions to solve right problems. Collectively, to keep knowledge update, people should think of knowledge sharing as something they gain, rather than lose. In present days, we cannot separate knowledge and creativity if we want to stay competitive on the market. Continuous learning is important to build a culture of creativity.

Going digital is an evolutionary journey with all phases of blueprinting, designing, optimizing and measuring. The digital business life cycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of finding a vision/mantra reflecting the objectives and soul of the company, participation, adaptability, innovation, people-centricity, and taking a holistic management approach to reach the next level of organizational maturity.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization