The 21st Century Business Transformational Capabilities

It is important to understand that digital business management is multifaceted and takes high-quality effort to enable organizations to thrive. 

In today’s business dynamic, the enterprise consists of a set of capabilities that are fundamental building blocks in digital transformations with which companies can transform business models, operational processes, and customer experiences to reach high-level business maturity.

There are many "ingredients" in business capability. Among them, capability encapsulates people, processes, technology, and other intangible and tangible resources which are important for a business's capability to be effective and weave it into the business competency.


Learning capability: Organizational learning is enabling employees to constantly learn so that the organization not only "earn enough from today, but thrive in the future.” It evolves Knowledge Management Capability and Organizational Intelligence. Learning becomes a knowledge builder and change catalyst. Talent management, information & knowledge management, and resource management need to be integrated into a holistic approach to develop learning capability and maximize collective human potential.

It’s important to create a business context in which people are encouraged to learn, empowered and respected to create the business synergy and ensure people with the right capabilities are in the right positions to solve the right problems. Digital leaders should make an objective assessment of their organization’s learning maturity and develop a highly effective learning platform with all important components to build the organizational learning competency proactively.

Change capability: In the face of “VUCA” digital new normal, businesses will be more successful when they realize that one of their greatest strengths will be their changeability. It takes a lot of effort and resources to make change happen. The changes delivered could be incremental, transitional, or transformational if it is fundamentally shifting the entire business model of an organization.

Organizational change management has a strong role in business transformation, benefits realization, and strategy execution. It’s important to first understand how much change capability (people, process, and technology) is really required for the effort you are kicking off. From a finance perspective, the better the quality of the change management program, the more anticipated benefits, and deliverables will be achieved.

Innovation capability: Innovation is the most wanted change and innovation capability is the key differentiator between the leader and the follower. In essence, innovation management is about how to manage people, processes, technology, assets, time, resources, and risks to develop innovation as the management process and the business-wide unique competency for achieving high-performance business goals and unleashing organizational potential.

Every organization needs to develop tailored innovation principles, methodologies, practices and apply them wisely with the expertise to really add value or drive digital innovation and develop the organizational level innovation competency. The most powerful innovation navigation system involves tapping the organization's ecosystem for collective perspectives and knitting all critical business elements into differentiated innovation competency.

Process optimization capability: The benefits of "business process management" are simply the ability to do the right things in the right way, and use the right resources at the right times/places. Important business processes reviewed and refined regularly are transparent across the organization and should help to bring into alignment with most of the key parts of the business. It helps to establish early buy-in and support through analysis of how the business initiatives impact the people in the organization in order to refine people-centric process management up to the next level of maturity.

An effective and efficient business model is business process management with a representation of people management and reaches the ultimate goal to build a high-performing, antifragile, and customer-intimate digital business. There is a logical business process optimization scenario that evolves business capability requirements into enterprise competency, business model and implementation plan and performance review, to reach the high level of employee loyalty, financial health, and shareholder delight.

Governance capability: Governance is like steer-wheel, to ensure enterprise running in the right direction and well headed to the destination. Corporate governance discipline can fulfill its purpose as a high-level corporate enabler by providing a structured communication bridge between shareholders and top business leaders such as corporate directors. Good governance creates a good decision-making system and controlling system, which can assure the corporations’ operation under the correct directions and behaviors correctly.

Governance can begin with frameworks and policies to be put in place, depending on the nature, scale, and complexity of the organization. Governance not only should but must influence to manage the level of performance of all the members of the company. Sound governance is part of eliminating risk and doing the right thing. Some old school of management thinks governance is only for the bottom line, statistically, the organizations with governance competency will outperform competitors significantly.

It is important to understand that digital business management is multifaceted and takes high-quality effort to enable organizations to thrive. The dynamic digital organizations need to get away from letting things fall apart and start to learn how to develop the lego-like distinctive business capabilities and create “integrated wholes” to achieve the art of possible.

Posted in: Digital Master,Enterprise Capability