Friday, September 15, 2017

Three Perspectives Why is Digital Transformation Worth its Weight

Digital is worth its weight when all parts of the choir sing their respective parts in harmony to achieve a higher purpose and make a unique impact, to improve business performance and maturity.  

Digital means flow; digital organizations have to adapt to the continuous changes and business dynamic to get digital ready. However, for many organizations, digitalization is still the unsolved puzzle with some or many missing pieces. The organizational management short-sightedness and running the business in a transactional mode can only cause digital ineffectiveness in the long run. A digital transformation is an overarching approach that has to dig underneath the surface of businesses and take a holistic approach to integrate both hard and soft business elements to improve the long-term organizational competency. Here are three perspectives on why digital transformation worths its weight.


A good way to catalyze digital transformation is to first define what is meant by digital paradigm shift: Digital Paradigm means holism, hyper-connectivity, interdependence, and integration. Digital transformation is the journey for solving problems caused by "Conflict," "Out of Balance," “Lack of Logic.” Therefore, it is critical to apply a holistic management discipline which can break through the industrial constraints and limitations. The deep problem that reveals is to understand what are the evolutionary pathways implied by switches we don't understand or understand the potential of digital transformation. To stay competitive, companies must go beyond experimenting with digital, take a holistic approach, commit to transforming themselves into a fully digital business powerhouse. The digital business today is not just working within the industry, but also permeating cross-ecosystem which is dynamic, continuous and interactive. The challenge is to prioritize what you know about and keep an eye open for signs of things you don't know about. Every company needs a structural strategic planning process and a healthy management cycle. So many companies and "managers" focus on the tangibles, but they lack the in-depth understanding of the intangible things; just getting them to consider the list of intangibles business elements would be a breakthrough. Digital transformation worths its weight because you have to leverage all visible and invisible elements, and you have to transform the company's underlying functions and organization as a whole with adjusted digital speed. And most importantly, you have to build a “Change culture,” to get their people ready for change, encourage innovation and improve overall business responsiveness, performance, speed, and maturity.  


Understanding nonlinearity as the very characteristic of the digital organization and business ecosystem could be at the tipping point for the digital paradigm shift: Digital enterprises are inherently and intensely complex. These changes do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways. They act as a complex and unpredictable system, feeding, amplifying or ameliorating the effects of others and shaping organizational structures and systems. Digital transformation is worth its weight because digital businesses and their people have to get used to the “VUCA” digital new normal, learn through their interactions with the environment, they act, observe the consequences of their action, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future action. The digital transformation process is adaptively rational, it has to strike the balance of ‘keeping the order,’ and sparking the innovation. It is important to apply interdisciplinary knowledge and science to digital management methodologies and practices, to enable digital leaders or professionals framing bigger thinking boxes, to work across the multiple boxes, and resolve problems technically, scientifically, philosophically, psychologically, sociologically, or simply put, holistically.

There is no “one size fits all” approach for managing change and every business evolves digital transformation with different speed: There are too many different types of change management initiatives, so there is no one size fits all approach to successfully managing change. Some leading organizations already reach the strategic inflection point which is a time in the life cycle of a business when its fundamentals (people, process, technologies, cultures) are about to make the change with increasing speed. Some other companies are perhaps just at the tipping point to plan the change. To manage change successfully, it is important to embed creativity as the change mechanism. Regardless of vertical sectors, making changes should be a fun and innovative journey, not just a stressful one-time project. Silos are constant barriers to business advancement or maturity. Today’s digital companies have to relentlessly improve their key business elements, emphasize participation, relationships, communication, and realize that they will need to renew themselves periodically to cope effectively with fast-paced changes and have a fluid structure that responds effectively to the business dynamic. Cross-silo or cross-divisional collaboration is crucial to building change as a dynamic digital capability. The digital dynamic ecosystem explicitly seeks to create a holistic and creative environment where people can grow, innovate, and businesses focus on dynamic resources, long-term perspective, scalable performance, and harmonized relationship.


Change is costly. Digital transformation is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. Digital transformation is worth its weight not just because of its high cost, but because of its high impact on the business’s long-term prosperity. It's important to leverage holistic and systems thinking to understand the variety of business relationship and manage the business in a more structural way. Digital is worth its weight when all parts of the choir sing their respective parts in harmony to achieve a higher purpose and make a unique impact, to improve business performance and maturity.  

0 comments:

Post a Comment