Balance Important Characteristics of Digital Maturity

Digital organizations need to emphasize participation, relationships, communication, and realize that organizations will need to renew themselves periodically to cope effectively with change.

Digital enterprises are inherently and intensely complicated due to exponential growth of information and frequent disruptions. Thus, the management no longer can sit on the sideline, but need to proactively adapt to the new normal, as changes do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways. Ideally, a high mature organization is able to reconfigure its own structure and change its own behavior in adaptation to environmental dynamics and information fludity. A digitally competent organization with the following characteristics can take a structural procedure to drill down the critical success factors and develop differentiated business competencies.

Informative: Statistically, more than 80% of the enterprise value today is based on nonfinancial assets, which in a complex digital world are coming and going very rapidly. Information is one of the most invaluable “soft assets” and the lifeblood of business and it drives digital awareness, Information flow streamlines idea flow and business flow. But keep in mind, information is the means to the end, information is the gold when it has been used to make informed management decisions to create business value.

Discover how and where to find invaluable information, not just the information being fed by the management, but to pull out the information they need and also learn what to ignore. Over time, you develop an effective set of filters that help you find new information as well as information you can trust for making strategic decisions. You have to know how to swim more effortlessly in the sea of information, and you should realize that different information is required at different points in the decision and operational delivery chain.

Emergent: The digital world is dynamic, nonlinear, uncertain, and volatile, emergence becomes apparent. Business Systems have what is known as "emergent properties," to mean any outcome of a system in operation. It is important for the organization to identify emergent business properties and enable desirable emergent property, as well as how information is associated with the valued tangibles of businesses, products and resources.

With the faster paces of changes and continuous disruptions, businesses become more dynamic and hyper connected, digital paradigm is an emerging ecosystem of principles, policies, and practices that set the rules and offer guidance for running a dynamic business. The “Emergent Properties," either being called synergy or ongoing capability, are critical factors to help the business strive vigorously in leading digital transformation. And a healthy planning-adjusting-evolving digital refinement cycle creates the business synergy to improve problem-solving effectiveness.

Generative: High mature organizations keep evolving to generate multidimensional values, multiple solutions and abundant knowledge or ideas, rather than just “keep spinning” without going anywhere. From a business design perspective, if we have a set of patterns that bear some relationship to one another, usually because they are in some common domain, then we can compose those patterns to generate a larger design or architecture. From a problem solving perspective, a pattern language can generate different solutions, for a given solution is the combination of the inner forces acting on the system with the pattern language applied to solve that particular combination of forces.

Nowadays, digital provides an unprecedented opportunity to collaborate and co-create ideas cross-boundaries. To shape a “generative organization,” It is important to create conditions so that the ideas can flow and creative potential can manifest, allowing employees at all levels to be open to new ideas, co-create fresh knowledge, experimentation with new ways of doing things, learning from instead of condemning or punishing mistakes, errors. So the creative spirit is lifted and digital potential can be unleashed.

Integrative: Digital organizations are ever evolving business systems which are like three sides of a con, this side, that side and the integrative relationship between them. They act as a complex and unpredictable system, feeding, amplifying or ameliorating the effects of others, integrating and shaping organizational structures and systems. It’s important to understand how relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between business units are related. Organizations need to manage and integrate multi-layer, and multi-dimensional business relationships such as cross-functional relationship, customer relationship, vendor relationship, effectively. And they can improve its effectiveness by integrating communication into problem-solving competency.

From a Systems perspective, the responsibility of modern management is to provide information accessibility and availability, ensure transparency and visibility, enable trust and reliability, and offer integrated information lifecycle management solutions to capture business insight and create a cohesive structure that continually delivers what the business needs and takes further steps to maximize business potential. An information strategy needs to be integrated into the strategic goal of the business, helping to build up an analytics-driven culture across the organization and improve the organizational decision maturity. An 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 and responds to rapid changes continuously.

Iterative: Nowadays digital management is an iterative business continuum means setting metrics, adjusting plans, measuring performance and understanding results dynamically. The challenge for any business is to explore successful organizational structures that help to empower people, enforce iterative communication, and harness cross-functional collaboration to accelerate business performance.

Becoming a consistent innovative company requires tuning both the organizational structure and culture that nurture new ideas and is able to profitably execute on those ideas. The journey of digitalization is more evolutionary than revolutionary; cascading than the straight line. Innovation Management is like the upward spiral, you cannot “disrupt” without incremental change and iterative growth cycle. It is critical to put the stronger emphasis on empowering people, refining knowledge; catalyzing innovation, and spiraling up to reach the next level of business maturity.

Digital organizations need to emphasize participation, relationships, communication, and realize that organizations will need to renew themselves periodically to cope effectively with change and have a fluid structure that responds effectively and makes an impact on the hyperconnected digital ecosystem. Forward-thinking organizations are in the state of introducing new business concepts, experimenting with something new or exploring better opportunities to grow the business, balancing the key elements impacting change such as people, processes/procedures and Information Technology and improving the organizational performance and maturity.

Posted in: Digital Master,Digital Maturity