Running Lightweight Digital IT to Catalyze Digital Transformation

Organizations large or small are on the journey of digital transformation. Literally transformation is to radically change the nature of something. So digital transformation is a radical change of business, leverage digital technologies to renovate business process, innovate organization culture, reinvent digital leadership and reimagine the new possibilities to unleash the full business potential of the business. Forward-looking organizations also empower their IT leaders to lead more proactively and take advantage of lightweight digital technology to catalyze digital transformation.
Optimization: Technology is often the disruptor of digital transformation. Technology is also the enabler to improve business effectiveness and efficiency. It is about using technology to lower costs, improve operations, and increase revenue. Therefore, the focus of digital IT needs to provide business capabilities, not just commodity services. Businesses need IT as a strategic partner who is passionate about exploiting information enabled by technologies to work at the center of the enterprise. The pervasive digitization requires both business and technology professionals to rethink how things are done in organizations. IT is in a unique position to oversee organizational processes which underpin business capabilities. Therefore, IT plays a crucial role to optimize management capacity with a keen eye to grasp the business opportunity and improve operational efficiency via applying lightweight technologies seamlessly. In addition, now we have more computing power, greater connectivity, more data, greater potential empowerment of the worker, etc.  the pervasive digitalization requires learning agility -to experiment the “new way to do things,” and “learning and doing” and encourage innovation.
Delight: IT is also moving up its maturity from functioning, to firm to delight. The lightweight digital technologies have more power, but less wire, IT is also shifting from “built to last,” to “design to change.” With the emergent trend of IT consumerism, business professionals request IT to think about the opportunities made available by pervasive digitization and provide the similar technologies or tools that they use in their personal life. They require not just the things work but be delightful and innovative to improve their productivity and engagement. The cornucopia of design options is exploited and managed, thus, becomes a crucial factor in an organization's success in producing digitized products and services. Therefore, user interface design often becomes a strategic topic for the top executive teams, because organizations with fine design and UX competencies are more capable of attracting and delighting customers, and properly implementing and accelerating their digital transformation as well, because they take better advantage of the information-based externalities inaccessible to older structures, a feat that will empower them to grow significantly faster than their linear counterparts, and improve organizational maturity as well.
Speed: Digital is about speed, lighter, but faster. The powerful technology and wisely usage of information can improve productivity, enforce collaboration and innovate business solutions. However, in practice, even in the simplest organizations, the 'speed' is not homogeneous across the enterprise, there are differences between 'front office' and 'back office,' enterprises with multiples businesses and associated business models. So many organizations will have to 'mix & match' at least two different speeds' with appropriate management styles. In the traditional organization running in an industrial mode, IT is often perceived to be too slow to adapt to the changes in the majority of organizations due to heavyweight legacy technology and redundant processes. Now IT plays a leading role in driving digitalization in the most advanced companies. Hence, IT needs to focus on the fastest speed available, because that is where the main threat is to competitiveness, and the lightweight digital technologies do make IT nimble, ambidextrous, fast-responding, and adapt to changes.
Digital IT means hyperconnected with less wire; hyper-competitive with better capabilities; hyper-integrated with business via optimization; hyper-efficient via automation; running full speed with less friction, unleash its full potential via improvement, intelligence and innovation.

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