The Flow and Growth of Digital Organization

Every organization is at different stages of the business growth cycle, it perhaps requires diverse flows and differentiated business manageability.

The blurring line of the business border and the uncharted frontier of an organization provides both unprecedented opportunities and emergent risks that companies must deal with appropriately for adapting to the dynamic ecosystem smoothly.

Thus, enterprises today need to become more open and responsive, be solid enough to keep business in order and fluid enough to keep things flowing and make proactive changes within the ever-evolving digital ecosystem, and adapt to changes effortlessly.

Strategy management flow: Vision- Gap analysis - Strategy- Execution - Balanced Scorecard Flow: Vision is where you want to be and strategy is how you can get there. So, in order to craft a living strategy, closing the vision gap is in fact to close the strategy management gaps. Some visions are tunnel-like, other visions are short-sighted; but the best digital vision should be circular, inspiring, and reachable. A strategic plan outlines the preferred course of actions at the outset of implementing the strategy – provide direction – but this will inevitably evolve different management stages from: Vision-setting: “where do you want to go and what do you want to achieve,” to Gap analysis: “the currents state assessment” to Strategy Planning: how to get there, the roadmap” to Execution: focusing on achieving strategic goals to Balanced Scorecard (objectives, metrics).

In respect of gaps between strategy and execution, the strategy is a statement of “higher intent” but is not a detailed plan in itself. It’s important to prioritize strategic goals and get into actions in a step-wise way. Strategic management is the continuous planning, analysis, monitoring, and assessment of all that is necessary for an organization to meet its visions, missions, goals, and objectives, and enforce the effectiveness of the strategy-execution continuum. The balanced scorecard enables the management to accurately judge the coming curves and obstacles on the path of strategy management

Capability management flow: Strategic goal – Capability – Project – Business Factors (People, Process, and Technology): Many times, an organization has developed a wonderful strategy, but it does not apply to the environment mainly due to its organizational capability in executing it timely with agility, etc. Strategy Management provides coherence between actual capability and the strategic goals that have been defined and addresses in outline how the strategic objectives will be achieved, which includes exploiting your center of gravity. The capability is the ability to achieve the desired effect under specified performance, standards, and conditions through combinations of ways and means to perform a set of activities. The capability model/map, once being built, is a tool to visualize the end-to-end enterprise, allowing you to demonstrate the capabilities necessary to deliver products/services, and then develop the capabilities that are necessary to support them. Capability management flow evolves the multiple stages: Strategic goal – Capability – Project – Business Factors (People, Process, and Technology)

The strategic capability mapping helps to visualize the “gap of opportunity” between where you are and want to become. The architecture is used as a collaboration instrument to orchestrate business processes and manage a balanced project portfolio to develop a set of business capabilities by interweaving all key business factors such as people, processes, or technologies. The management should ponder how to manage projects with multi-interdependent workflows, etc. It’s important to implement an end to end demand management process which takes care of new project validation, business case approval, project development, design, user training and rollout, user adoption and change management and benefits realization, etc.

Information management flow: Information - knowledge- intelligence- insight -innovation: Information and knowledge do not stand still! It flows into the company, it flows out of it, and it flows to the customers of the company in terms of product and service deliveries. Information flow streamlines business flow, more attention needs to be placed on the conditions that allow information to flow and generate value rather than try to manage or control information. Digital information & knowledge flow helps to unlock latent expertise, collaborate through communities with geographically-distributed teams, and arise the opportunity to catalyze innovation.

The organizational ecosystem environment is constantly changing, forcing the business to keep adjusting and streamline flow. There are natural frictions between different functions of the organization. An intelligent and open information system can incorporate both ends and means; continuously open to new information from the dynamic business environment and is able to circulate information within the system seamlessly, process and refine information systematically and transcend information to intelligence, insight, and innovation smoothly.

Every organization is at different stages of the business growth cycle, it perhaps requires diverse flows and differentiated business manageability. Each growth stage of the business involves flow and ebb and leading the evolutionary path to drive changes. Digital management is responsible for designing, enabling, and enforcing flow and growth, and running a high-performance digital organization.

Posted in: Digital Agility,Digital Maturity,Strategy