Organizations have to strike the delicate balance between solid and flow, front and behind, up & down, rather than try to manage or control only, in order to avoid pitfalls and create value consistently.
At the end of the day, change is never for its own sake, it’s about business improvement, innovation for achieving higher than expected business value.
Solid & Fluid: Running an effective business is to strike the right balance of solid operation and change fluidity. It is about how to connect the old and new, mix the solid and fluid to enforce business confluence. Information confluence means breaking down functional silos or geographical borders to streamline information flow, keep information and knowledge flow in the digital ecosystem, to ensure information integrity and consistency. The goal is about getting the right information to the right people, in the right format at the right time, to make right decisions for solving right problems.
Compared to traditional organizations with overly rigid organizational hierarchy and structure, digital organizations have to be solid enough to keep the business running, but fluid enough to enable ideas flowing in a hyperconnected expanded digital ecosystem with the accelerating speed. The challenge is that information/knowledge is fluid, they cannot be managed like those other hard assets. The focus needs to be on the conditions that allow information and knowledge to flow and generate value. And the idea flow can be streamlined via enforcing cross-functional communication by using common business language, and taking incentives to encourage sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Front & Behind: Forward-looking organizations strive to become people-centric organizations. The front-line workers must be involved in the customer-centric process improvement). Because they often have direct experience working with customers and solving their problems. You would have no process without customer touch-points, therefore, the customer interactions are the route course of all of your internal interactions. Customer exists first, hence the process to serve the customer better comes into existence.
So behind the scenes, it’s important to understand the complexity of information technology, business processes for improving the overall customer experience. Technically, the complexity of aggregate layers of every internal IT system is a burden that often causes conflicts and decelerates business speed. IT is complex, it doesn't mean that IT should continue to complicate matters or increase unnecessary complexity without discipline. Quite many business professionals across disciplines actually work behind the scenes to improve business effectiveness and efficiency.
Up & Down: Neither top-down nor bottom-up change will be successful in isolation. Successful enterprises embrace top down and bottom up with the right mix for achieving high performance results. Change needs to be inspired from top-down, as the top leadership team’s commitment will reassure those who have doubts, make sure that the business moves in the right direction and the strategy time horizon. Top-down change approach is beneficial when the organization maintains coherence while allowing autonomy. On the other hand, a bottom up approach to change is important because people feel more engaged in providing feedback, taking initiatives to identify problems and solve them on time.
In practice, the right mix of bottom-up and top-down change management practices are crucial to both embed change into business DNA and integrate change management into strategy management for driving the long term business transformation success. It’s about leveraging collective knowledge and creativity to develop the business climate for change and drive change success coherently. So Change Management is everyone's responsibility. Change management that addresses the 'people change' aspects of a business initiative is more important than any really cool technology deployment.
Change Management is like GPS, acting in current operations or processes, introducing more progressive ways of achieving the same result, normally for increased efficiency or added value. All these need a vehicle to arrive at the desired point. It is one of many disciplines needed to lead successful business transformation. Organizations have to strike the delicate balance between solid and flow, front and behind, up & down, rather than try to manage or control only, in order to avoid pitfalls and create value consistently.
Compared to traditional organizations with overly rigid organizational hierarchy and structure, digital organizations have to be solid enough to keep the business running, but fluid enough to enable ideas flowing in a hyperconnected expanded digital ecosystem with the accelerating speed. The challenge is that information/knowledge is fluid, they cannot be managed like those other hard assets. The focus needs to be on the conditions that allow information and knowledge to flow and generate value. And the idea flow can be streamlined via enforcing cross-functional communication by using common business language, and taking incentives to encourage sharing and interdisciplinary collaboration.
So behind the scenes, it’s important to understand the complexity of information technology, business processes for improving the overall customer experience. Technically, the complexity of aggregate layers of every internal IT system is a burden that often causes conflicts and decelerates business speed. IT is complex, it doesn't mean that IT should continue to complicate matters or increase unnecessary complexity without discipline. Quite many business professionals across disciplines actually work behind the scenes to improve business effectiveness and efficiency.
Up & Down: Neither top-down nor bottom-up change will be successful in isolation. Successful enterprises embrace top down and bottom up with the right mix for achieving high performance results. Change needs to be inspired from top-down, as the top leadership team’s commitment will reassure those who have doubts, make sure that the business moves in the right direction and the strategy time horizon. Top-down change approach is beneficial when the organization maintains coherence while allowing autonomy. On the other hand, a bottom up approach to change is important because people feel more engaged in providing feedback, taking initiatives to identify problems and solve them on time.
In practice, the right mix of bottom-up and top-down change management practices are crucial to both embed change into business DNA and integrate change management into strategy management for driving the long term business transformation success. It’s about leveraging collective knowledge and creativity to develop the business climate for change and drive change success coherently. So Change Management is everyone's responsibility. Change management that addresses the 'people change' aspects of a business initiative is more important than any really cool technology deployment.
Change Management is like GPS, acting in current operations or processes, introducing more progressive ways of achieving the same result, normally for increased efficiency or added value. All these need a vehicle to arrive at the desired point. It is one of many disciplines needed to lead successful business transformation. Organizations have to strike the delicate balance between solid and flow, front and behind, up & down, rather than try to manage or control only, in order to avoid pitfalls and create value consistently.
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