Three Clarifications Enable Smooth Digital Transformation

The purpose of going digital is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of achieving high performing business result and unlocking the full business potential.

Digital transformation is the radical change and a tough journey with many obstacles on the way. Riding ahead of the change curve takes both principles and practices, strategy and discipline. Digital transformation can impact the core, businesses today must dynamically develop, enable and sustain the changeability of an enterprise. A highly changeable organization is the company that can align all critical business elements seamlessly, quickly and safely assess all of the consequences of a possible change and devise effective plans to provide a combination approach to go digital. Here are three clarifications help the business drive digital transformation smoothly.

Vision and strategic goal clarification: Change is not for its own sake, every change needs to have a noble business purpose and a well-set change agenda. This is particularly critical for the large scale digital transformation which has to expand in every direction of the business. You have to determine why you are doing it; what are strategic goals behind change and objectives you are trying to reach. Vision and strategic goals need to be clarified and have to be accessible, understandable, and made relevant to all levels of the organization.

More specifically, it’s about translating the company vision into broadly defined strategic goals and objectives which are achievable components to focus on reaching the future state of the business. Leaders should actively make decisions that are in concert with the clarified vision and strategic goals by applying “SMART” (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) principles. The relevant goal classification for digital transformation helps the leadership team keep a pulse on progress and enable the execution team understanding what needs to be done by setting the right priority, and evolving the emerging business properties with speed, to steer the business in the right direction without getting lost.

Communication clarification: Digital communication is sophisticated, but it’s the coordination mechanism to inspire, motivate, persuade, negotiate, and clarify, to make progressive change possible and allow a group of people to function as a cohesive team to achieve more. Communication clarity directly impacts on the change effectiveness and the speed of digital transformation. In practice, miscommunication is a common pitfall which is often caused by misinformation or perception gaps because people have a different knowledge base and cognitive understanding to articulate things.

Communication bottleneck and the primary impediments to collaboration is a dissonance between upper and middle management or middle management and front line employees. To clarify communication, pay attention to context, context, and style. The great communicators can communicate objectively with strong logic, clarity, and understanding.

The strategic communication of digital transformation initiated by top digital leaders are not the one-way street, but multidimensional paths from top-down to bottom up; from inside out to outside-in, etc. The effective and clarified communication can fortify cross-functional coordination by strengthening weak links and bridging gaps. It embraces clarity, creativity, context, cascade, consistency, to enforce trust and accountability, streamline knowledge flow, enforce accountability, and achieve digital synchronization.

Role/responsibility clarification: The most important factor for positive change is flexibility in planning, decide to be prepared for the inevitable change, clarify the roles and responsibilities, and take actions at the steadfast pace. 

People need to be the center of change. Role and responsibility clarification is critical; you need to determine what's best for each position based on what it will contribute to your overall goals, then go get it. Who is initiating the change? Who is accountable for the quality and the cost of transformation? Who is providing change adoption strategy? Who is accountable for change in capabilities at the core? Who leads the execution of change? Who is accountable for achieving change objectives? Etc, Nowadays, change is an ongoing business capability, pay attention to role clarification and the human dynamics of personalities and human behavior, to ensure the right people with the right capabilities being put in the right position to make changes happen and sustain. 

Select the best for change agent role who has the right mindset, the right sense of duty, the right set of values, collaborative ways of working, the right approach to achieve the business results. Organizational change is the team effort, shared responsibility or collective accountability involves shared ownership, can be harnessed by motivating people to achieve the “art of the possible,” and build a culture of learning, trust, and professionalism.

The purpose of going digital is to make a significant difference in the overall levels of achieving high performing business result and unlocking the full business potential. It’s critical to clarify vision, goals, strategy and environment, master in communication, sharing and leading, put a stronger emphasis on empowering people, build a strategic roadmap, explore the source of knowledge, improve business adaptations and enforce people-centricity.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digitalization