Build Digitally Competent Organization

It takes a structural procedure to drill down the critical success factors and develops differentiated business competency to unlock the business full potential.

With “VUCA” digital new normal, organizations today have to adapt to continuous changes, the exponential growth of information, and frequent disruptions. Digital management is fundamentally an iterative cycle to design, develop, scale, and optimize business competency for integrating, optimizing, innovating, and achieving the desired effect under specified performance standards and conditions, and build the digitally competent organization.

Strategically competent: With rapid changes and fierce competitions, organizational strategic management is both system and process to deal with dynamic and iterative planning and execution continuum. Strategic planning navigates through the dynamic business ecosystem, deals with horizontal scanning environmental and social monitoring, diagnoses key business issues, and knows what to look for, how to set guidelines when to make choices, and when to take wise actions. A good strategy articulates the differentiated competencies you should build for gaining the long-term business advantage, and a capability-based strategy has much higher opportunities to be implemented successfully. The digital strategy management is an iterative business continuum. A strategically competent organization has a deliberately close alignment among the company’s strategic direction, its most distinctive capabilities, to create synergies in making strategy everyone’s everyday job and a continual process mobilizing change and driving digital transformation.

Technically competent: The digital world is so data-driven and information-intensive, technology needs will only expand. Businesses today not just use Information Technology as a digital extension, but leverage it across their organization to attain the enterprise-wide digital competency. In fact, Information & Technology are the backbones of modern business. The digital era upon us is the era of information. Besides people, information is the most invaluable asset in businesses today. It has become more obvious that information stored and processed in the IT boxes is the real source of business innovation. Thus, companies across the vertical sectors need to manage their information excellently so that the company can capture business insight almost real-time in order to ride change curves and accelerate business growth continuously. From the ecosystem perspective, Information Management has an expansive impact on the economy, politics, culture, and human behavior. Technology has played a large role in “gluing” both hard and soft business elements to build a digitally competent modern organization. Information Technology becomes so critically, many times, it is a determining success factor for the long-term business strategy to achieve fast growth and business sustainability.

Culturally competent: Culture is a collective mindset, attitude, and behavior. Culture is certainly part of the environment in which an organization operates, it represents the 'box' in which decisions and actions occur. In order for organizations to reach new horizons, it is imperative for improving the organization's culture to the one that inspires creativity and catalyzes strategy execution. Culture is a competitive differentiator, and differentiation may be facilitated by a culture encouraging innovation individuality and collectively. At the organizational scope, it’s important to build an inclusive working environment as a melting pot to inspire creativity. That means you should reward taking risks, failing fast & forward, to innovate effectively. The culture of innovation is the key to the long-term success and thriving of a company. In practice though, building a highly innovative workplace and workforce is challenging because most businesses are interested in short-term visible results, but building innovation competency takes a good strategy put in place that targets the areas identified as “lacking” in creativity. Thus, to catalyze innovation, the strong level of business collaboration should entail effective communication, build trustful business partnerships, amplify collective potential, set cultural adjustment and understanding within the organization, and create a blue ocean for providing competitive advantages.

Digital transformation is a thorny journey full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity, with many curves and bumps on the way. A digitally competent organization is a system that is able to reconfigure its own structure and change its own behavior during the execution of its adaptation to environmental changes. It takes a structural procedure to drill down the critical success factors and develops differentiated business competency to unlock the business full potential and achieve long-term organizational growth and maturity.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digital Maturity,Digitalization