Sunday, July 14, 2019

Three Aspects of Organizational Digital Fit

To keep digital fit, dynamic digital organizations have to be solid enough to keep business in order and fluid enough to keep things flow and make proactive changes.

The digital business dynamic is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, ambiguity, information overloading, fierce competitions, and continuous disruptions, etc. The companies today have to move fast; the functional, geographical, organizational, and even industrial border are blurred, marketing, finance, technology, leadership, and talent are all intertwined. It’s important to work out a smooth strategy and business transformation by assessing the digital fit of the organization objectively and utilizing collective knowledge and experience to build competitive business advantage.




Digital consciousness: Digital means the exponential growth of information and abundance of knowledge. Running a conscious business means that the company can leverage information and technology as the “digital brain” to make conscious strategic choices, streamline business flow, and deliver high quality products/services/solutions to delight customers and build business competency. Digital ecosystem is complex and volatile, for complex problem-solving, understanding context is often the first and the most important step in developing digital consciousness. The business leaders and professionals can gain the digital consciousness by applying multidimensional thinking to understand business context and sustain diversified viewpoints in order to make sound judgment and thrive in the "VUCA" world. Contextual intelligence helps them recognize and diagnose the plethora of contextual factors inherent in the business circumstances, then intentionally and intuitively adjust their mindset and behaviors in order to exert influence in that context. The “incremental consciousness” about their own potential is changing the way today's digital professionals see their role in a team, company or the community, and develop their own set of practices to keep digital fit.

Digital literacy: Digital literacy is the ability to effectively and critically navigate, evaluate and create information using a range of digital technologies and tools. Developing digital literacy across the enterprise requires cross-functional collaboration and cross-disciplinary knowledge share. Knowledge transfer allows people to understand new topics and get access to knowledge effortlessly. It’s about applying interdisciplinary digital management to gain nonlinear understanding of the very characteristic of the digital organization and dynamic business ecosystem. So, organizations do not just respond to changes in a reactive mode but proactively manage knowledge, capture business insight, and bring greater awareness of systemic intricacies of the business systems. To improve its digital literacy, the organization today need to have an integral information and knowledge management approach; the linear business perception needs to be replaced by the adaptive digital system viewpoint, and the interdisciplinary business insight should lead the management not only understanding, but also predicting and proactively adapting to rapid changes, as well as pursuing solutions and purpose seeking, as a mode of thinking and action.

Digital competency: One of the very goals of developing digital literacy across the enterprise is to shape business capabilities and build the organizational wide competency. The maturity of a business capability would be based on the ability to deliver on either customer needs or to achieve the desired capability outcome. The cohesive set of business capabilities can be woven into core organizational competencies. All competitive organizations have two types of competencies: The necessary competencies to keep the lights on and the differentiated competencies to enable business standing out as a leader and building a strong brand. It’s important to re-purpose well-designed components and systems for change purpose, ensure that change can be accomplished quickly and consistently if the underlying structures and processes are dynamic and flexible and the business capabilities can be recombined and integrated without reinventing the wheel. With increasing pace of changes, it’s crucial to develop dynamic competencies for adapting to the “VUCA” world, and make strategic choices to identify key business capabilities and weave them into the organizational wide business competency.


Digital organizations are more like the living organic systems which spontaneously self-organize and self-renew, generate patterns, structures, business activities, and above all, create novelty over time. To keep digital fit, dynamic digital organizations have to be solid enough to keep business in order and fluid enough to keep things flow and make proactive changes within the ever-evolving digital ecosystem. You have to optimize the underlying functions, processes as well as fine-tune soft business elements such as leadership and culture, and expand changes to all directions; you also have to take an interdisciplinary approach and address business and system dynamics to lead progressive change and drive digital transformation seamlessly.

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