Cycle of Dependency

The tough work for an organization today is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational dependency-interdependency cycle with the appropriate mix of enabling organizational elements.

"Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity” is the new normal of the digital era, within this context, the organization must stay compatible and evolve in a compatible manner with its environment. 

There is the multitude of dependencies-interdependencies cycle businesses need to deal with, and there are both visible and invisible factors that companies should leverage to create proven synergy and run a high performance organization synchronously. 

Communication dependency: Communication is soft, but directly impacts the management effectiveness. Communication deficiency further causes decision inertia and decelerates business speed. The era of face-to-face, top-down hierarchical management, and communication – something that is reassuring to many traditional managers are beginning to change.

With the mixed bag of quality data and misinformation, truth and false, the message via top-down hierarchy is somewhat diluted by the time it reaches the employee responsible for making tactical decisions and doing their job. Therefore, to deal with communication dependency smoothly; it’s important to clarify communication, content, context, and style.  What’s the core message you need to deliver? What’s the relevant thoughts and perspectives? What's the best channel or multiple channels to deliver the message? Effective communicators are working to articulate and spread their messages throughout the organization in a diverse set of activities with mixed communication styles to improve their decision-making skills and problem-solving competency.

There tend to be definitely perceivable decision choke points due to the communication bottleneck and inadequate delegation. Management (change, innovation, strategy, etc.) often has a retrospective scenario, so the ultimate goal is the core message you need to deliver clearly. If you start with an inter-dependency of shared goals that are directly related to creating value for an organization, you have a great foundation for then working on the process of communicating down or up accordingly about how to make those goals a reality. C-level roles are supposed to be the guiding force in the enterprise, keep open communication, handle communication dependency by providing feedback to each other down to the hierarchy about the “why,” enforce cross-functional collaboration, harness decision coherence at the different levels of the company, for communicating shared goals and improving the multifaceted manageability.

Requirement dependency: Geographical, functional, or industrial boundaries are blurred, today’s organizations are at a crossroads where the segregation or siloing of business units are at a need to reach across the aisles and respectively work with each other to co-solve problems effectively. The top managers need to be specialized generalists with a holistic perspective and ability; dealing with organizational requirement dependency, or relationship interdependence carefully for solving problems cohesively. A formal business requirements initiative performing enterprise mission and stakeholder needs analysis.

Organizations deliver the best solution to the business problems which meet business’s requirements or tailor customer’s needs. When it comes to collecting the business requirements, varying functions need to take the traceability path of where the requirements come from; clarify where all the functional boundaries are and who is organizationally associated with each, to avoid the pitfalls such as misreading business requirements or lost in translation symptoms. Dealing with requirement dependency and enhancing functional alignment not only about conformity, but also include a close partnership to set the right priority, solve complex problems and come up with the right solution. There is a co-dependency that should be recognized in a mature - respectful manner that facilitates the strategic goals and objectives of the enterprise. It takes both disciplines and practices for prioritizing requirements and keeping things synchronized.

Capability dependency: Enterprise success is dependent upon few core and differentiating business capabilities. Capabilities may include dependencies, one is part of another or depends on another. A firm's capabilities today are the result of its history that constrains what capabilities the firm can perform in the future. To implement capability-based strategy, organizations need to discover their “innate strength” with a unique set of core competencies,

To provide an insight into condition and relationship/dependency of business capability, business executives are sufficiently aware of the "general condition" of the various capabilities and provide input into a qualitative assessment of capability effectiveness, adequacy, coherence, differentiability, resilience, or maturity.

The value of capability maps is to provide a useful tool to visualize the end-to-end enterprise, understand relationship/dependency between different capabilities, and make an objective assessment of their business capability maturity. The strong capability mapping also includes capability dependency identification, to ensure seamless capability integration and capability portfolio coherence, highlight the value of having a good understanding of current and future capabilities, and develop and improve the overall organizational competency.

Dependency, interdependency are the natural relationship between things, people or our hyperconnected world. Organizations are interdependent whole, and organizational interdependencies have a lifecycle. The tough work for an organization today is to manage its portfolio of relevant cross-border strategic synergies and organizational dependency-interdependency cycle with the appropriate mix of enabling organizational elements for balance effectiveness and efficiency; process and flexibility, design and standardization.

Posted in: Communication,Digital Master,Digital Maturity,EA,Enterprise Capability