Innovativecapabilityassessment

High mature organizations won’t imitate, but build their set of dynamic capabilities and differentiated competency.

Capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and require a combination of people, processes, and technology to perform a set of activities for achieving the desired effect under specified standards and conditions. 

A set of capabilities which define how you do something (marketing, logistics, production, etc.) can be combined into business competencies to implement strategic planning, directly impacting the organizational competitive advantage and maturity.

Capability coherence: The business capability coherence is the decisive factor for the success of strategy implementation and how well organizations can take the step-wise approach to make business transformation with agility and resilience. Technically, processes underpin capabilities; to achieve capability coherence, it’s important to conduct fit or gap analysis of capability vs requirements, to identify areas in a capability portfolio that can be integrated and optimized, eliminate duplication and improve effectiveness, etc.

Corporate capabilities are typically expressed in generally high-level terms and require a combination of people, processes, and technology to achieve. Thus, companies need to continue fine-tuning business processes, developing talent, taking advantage of emerging technologies, weaving all necessary hard and soft elements into cohesive business capabilities. Each of these same capabilities may be combined in different fashions to yield multiple competencies.

Capability agility: Organizational success is dependent upon a few core and differentiating business capabilities. In order to adapt to the rapid business environment and explore growth potential of the company, the capability development cycle is significantly shortened, and businesses are able to integrate people-centric processes into dynamic capabilities; or recombine existing capabilities into differentiated competencies to accelerate business performance. Dynamic capabilities are more complex in design, more seamless in integration, more time-intensive in speed, requiring cross-functional collaboration, embedding agility into processes for adapting to changes, and shortening the delivery cycles for improving business responsiveness.

Many components of business capabilities are common and reusable across the enterprise. To shorten the time cycle and save the cost for building dynamic capabilities, it’s important to analyze and synthesize, internal processes are broken into modular service components that have standard open interfaces; deploy organizational assets or resources in combination, optimize processes, capacity and overall business manageability. Loosely structured, circular processes allow companies to connect with the various points of the spiral in different ways vertically or horizontally, and integrate varying components into capabilities dynamically. 

Capability maturity: Every business is different, and they are at the different stages of business maturity. Every surviving business has certain capabilities to reach certain business results. However, only very few high-performing businesses have a high mature level of capabilities that enable them to become leaders in their vertical industry and ensure long term prosperity. There are gaps existing in capability development because there are no mechanisms to handle risks or uncertain situations. Also, the unrealistic designs could not be implemented in the organizational system. Governance is needed to manage risks in capability development and improve capability maturity.

The maturity of a business capability would be based on the ability for the companies to deliver on customer needs or to achieve the desired outcome. Capability optimization should move from base or competitive level to differentiated level, evolving and moving between categories based on technology evolution, information refinement, business driver, process/structural agility, knowledge transfer, business model evolution etc. Thus, for every corporation which should work and be efficient, you need strong GRC disciplines that help executives and management perform a risk analysis, harness connectivity, raise visibility and awareness for capability design, development and integration.

High mature organizations won’t imitate, but build their set of dynamic capabilities and differentiated competency, continue to upgrade organizational capabilities with repurpose, realignment, and reconfiguration. The goal is to ensure that strategic goals can be accomplished quickly and consistently, reach the next business growth cycle effortlessly and improve the overall business maturity.

Posted in: Enterprise Capability,Innovation