Loosely Coupled -interdependence

Either digital organizations or modern societies are loosely defined as dynamic entities and the hub of cultures within a geographical location.

The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but permeating a cross-ecosystem which is dynamic, continuous, interdependent and interactive. Imagine the organizational complexity that comes in due to very characteristics such as less structure, rules and regulations, diversity, volatility, ambiguity, unpredictability, nonlinearity, hyper diversity, and increased flux working and impacting together. How to apply emerging digital technologies and nonlinear business management disciplines to build flexible businesses?

Loosely structured cross-border interdependencies require a much greater dose of informal organizational elements: In a traditional organizational structure, the processes are more formal and rigid. With fast paced change and frequent disruptions, organizations need to leverage collaboration tools that enable not only the structured processes of the past but also the unstructured processes, experiment with a more fluid structure that is smarter and faster than pure hierarchies, with blurred boundaries maintained by attractions and repulsion, and behave like living organisms. The goal is to break off silo paradigms and loosen overly restricted structure, utilize cutting-edge narrow band psychometrics to diagnose problems, and drive changes seamlessly.

Loosely structured cross-border interdependencies require a much greater dose of informal organizational elements such as information flow, shared corporate values and culture, common business language, multidimensional knowledge and skills. These management elements function as a large set of small roads are able to carry the “capillary organizational traffic” of emergent cross-border, non-structured interdependencies across organizational nodes. So either vertically or horizontally, business information can flow frictionlessly and a variety of stakeholders such as employees, vendors, and customers can work cooperatively to generate business multilateral value.

The digital loosely coupled modular capabilities and processes can be broken into modular service components that have standard open interfaces: Building an extensive and real-time digital organization is about developing the lego-like modular business architecture, and crafting scalable capabilities with quality and reusability. Loose coupling makes it possible to change the components without affecting the system, as long as the interface is kept stable. The internal processes need to be broken into modular service components that have a standard open interface, with the goal to achieve strategic flexibility.

It takes cohesive collaboration for business as a whole, aligns the different parts of the ecosystem to adopt more points of integration, with layered and loosely coupled modular capabilities to build differentiated business competencies. Enterprise capability management, in essence, consists of a portfolio or matrix of capabilities that are used in various combinations to achieve performance outcomes. The dynamic digital organizations need to get away from letting things fall through and start creating “integrated wholes,” ride above the learning curve and take the journey of digital transformation steadfastly.

“Loosely control” rules can be fully supported, with architectural footprint: Principles over rules; empowerment over control, engagement over command, dynamic over static: autonomy over mandates, heterogeneity over homogeneity, etc. Fair rules lead to fair organizations and societies. By following a set of well-defined digital principles or rules, the business life cycle could be viewed as resulting in emergent means of reorganizing organizational structure, refocusing on strategic goals, rebalancing business resources, and redirecting people to understand the whole in terms of its inner processes, its interwoven business relationships, its interactions with external systems, its components, the specific interaction among them, its underlying functions and structures, to achieve high-performance business results.

The challenge for organizations is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic business competency, loosely coupled components, and organizational interdependence with “loose control” rules, the appropriate mix of enabling organizational elements, engaging digital talent with free thinking, balancing standardization and creativity, stability and changes, set fair principles, build well-rounded capabilities, optimize hybrid structure, run up all important stages for reaching high digital maturity and reap the benefit by going digital with full speed.

Either digital organizations or modern society is loosely defined as dynamic entities and the hub of cultures within a geographical location. It is loosely defined since there are dynamic business capabilities with loose coupling module design and a constant cultural diffusion of traits with a digital ecosystem. So information, ideas, and talent can flow smoothly and businesses can adapt to change promptly to unlock their full potential.

Posted in: Digital Master,Enterprise Capability