Joining Effort to Achieve "Utilitas"

The very characteristics of digital organization are about openness, responsiveness, innovativeness, fluidity, hybridity, high quality, and great design, etc

Digital organizations are the complex dynamics of the ecosystem within which the business is competing and with which the business is unavoidably entangled. In reality, every organization is at a different level of business maturity, has its own struggles and conflicts. From functioning to firming to delight, organizational maturity is assessed based on the overall business effectiveness, efficiency, operational excellence, responsiveness, performance, innovation, intelligence, resilience, and people-centricity. At the stage of Utilitas (functioning), think of quality of process and how to improve the overall performance of organizational units, efficiencies through automation, flexibility of inter-dependencies, etc.

Quality of process: Normally, an organization does not start with business processes--rather, it starts with vision, goals, and objectives-then the capabilities required to meet those goals and objectives. Then, map strategy-capability-process to close strategy and implementation; do the process assessments, and infer from that with the resulting capability perspective. The process is a "basic cell" in the sense of transforming inputs into outputs so it can be used to build the whole operation. Processes are the actions that provide desired capabilities as outcomes. Process Management is to manage the known from the flow. Where there is ineffectiveness and inefficiency in business management, there are quality gaps existing. High quality refers to simplicity, increasing transparency of the business environment through eliminating something which is not used for improving business efficiency.

Developing the business scope of best/next process to focus on improving quality attributes takes work and a level of credibility within the organization. Only when consensus is reached on the needed capabilities, is it time to fashion processes for executing those capabilities. Having important business processes reviewed regularly, refined regularly and are transparent across the business should help bring into alignment most of the key parts of the business. However, many organizations do not have alignment between strategic intentions and their ability to execute those intentions practically.

Efficiencies through automation: Effective automation should first examine these functions and understand the connections and define any constraints in the system. Identify and remove the inefficiencies and rationalize the manual actions first. Not all activities within a process can be automated but automation certainly makes the process more repeatable and predictable. The level of automation can play a role in choosing the right process for improvement and yield high ROI. Once you have very well defined processes and they are understood by all, you should move to automate as much as you can, in order to run more streamlined and profitable operations.The first stage on the journey to automation must be to examine crucial processes and identify how they can be made more efficiently and how they are connected to other processes. As this process goes along, see what can be automated by using the automation available natively within many of the tools you already have, but don’t use it because you don’t examine the processes from a holistic viewpoint on a regular basis.

There is a structural beauty in truly complex or self-organizing systems. Such systems are more likely to be able to hold true to their purpose rather than become self-serving systems that lose sight of their original aims. To optimize business operations and accelerate business speed, it’s important to automate the logistic part of the business to further improve productivity, performance, and quality. Gain an in-depth understanding of underlying business processes, functions, and structures, examine and understand the connections and define any constraints in the business system in order to take effective automation scenarios.

Flexibility of interdependencies: Flexible organizations tend to have business managers with the right mix of digital leadership traits and a variety of skills. They are clearly comfortable with ambiguity and respectful of processes, without being slaves to them. See the interconnectivity between parts and the whole, the relationship dynamic, and create common rationale between different perspectives in order to diagnose the real cause of problems, get behind the surface validation, and gain a deep insight into “why does the problem happen,” and how or solve problems in a structured way.

Unlike the closed mechanic system, digital organizations are like the living system, spontaneously self-organize, generate patterns, form structures, initiate business activities, and above all, create novelty over time. Loose coupling makes it possible to change the component without affecting the entire system, as long as the structure and interface are kept stable. Organizations are taking advantage of emerging digital technologies and abundant information for shaping highly adaptable and scalable digital organization. They build elasticity (scale up/down more seamlessly) by developing Lego-like module design architectures and capabilities with internal processes being broken into modular service components that have a standard open interface. Loose coupling makes it possible to change the components without affecting the system, as long as the interface is kept stable. Look at all the elements (including the human element) as an integrated, systemic system that functions as an organic living thing. “Individual” work and 'group' work cannot be done as a segregated form, but within a 'framework' of an entire system or 'frame of reference'... systems, processes, policies, culture, work climates, customers, and the whole business ecosystem.

The very characteristics of digital organization are about openness, responsiveness, innovativeness, fluidity, hybridity, high quality, and great design, etc, with a broad vision of transforming to the real-time, extensible enterprise. What can be unifying is looking at each function in the enterprise as a subsystem and then finding a unified means of looking at the essence. What’s “best” yesterday will not always be the best tomorrow. Every business is different, they are at a varying stage of its business life cycle and different level of organizational maturity. Thus, they have to keep developing their best and next practices, maintain and fix any imbalance in key business elements, to achieve utilitas and improve the organizational maturity,

Posted in: Digital Master,Digital Maturity,Digitalization