Is your Organization in the Progress, Plateau or Stagnation of Digital Transformation?

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology both horizontally and vertically. Businesses evolve changes at a different speed because they are at the different stage of the business lifecycle as well as they are in the different level of business maturity. Hence, in order to lead change effectively, business leaders should do the check-up continuously: Is your organization in the progress, plateau or stagnation of digital transformation?
Are still running an industrial type of the business like a mechanistic system, or having a living digital system which keeps growing:  Digital means flow, data flow, information flow and insight flow; knowledge does not stand still! It flows into the company, it flows out of it, it gets created, and it flows circling the digital ecosystem, hopefully, to ensure the right people getting the right information for making the right decisions. The difference between the mechanistic system and a digital system is the business purpose. Mechanistic systems serve a purpose. Digital System is where the whole has purposes of its own as well as the parts. Example: digital enterprise, where the organization has purposes of its own and the people working there maintain purposes of their own, people need to well align their professional goals with the overall business goals to build a win-win situation and maximize the collective human potential. For organizational design perspective, you have to look holistically at the problem domain in order to architect and design a sociological organization.
Be cautious to watch your digital barometer - people carefully: The mentality of people could well reflect the status of your digital transformation at certain degree: If people are striving to achieve the best, they are encouraged to be innovative and empowered to make changes, you are in the good shape on progression; if most people get stuck in the comfort zone to maintain the status quo and mediocrity get rewarded, you are perhaps at the plateau of change; while if even worse, if negative psychology and unhealthy competition dominate in the working environment, your organization gets stagnated, even on the backward journey. Being digital means to fine tuning the digital ecosystem to become more innovative. Constantly improve the business and see change as an opportunity while keeping a holistic overview of the business are the core messages of the text. Att the digital age, change has to become an ongoing capability and needs to be orchestrated at all levels to go hands-in-hands with strategy management. Creating a context where people can collaborate where they are empowered and respected and make collective decisions is the essence of the business "harmony" which digital can bring.
Also, make an objective assessment on how further and how deep your digital transformation could reach: To put another way, are you just doing digital by applying a few fancy digital gadgets or tools; or the culture of learning and change is permeating in the every corner of the business. Many organizations are still confused digital with general technology adoption. It's a significant shift from going digital to being digital. Being digital in one's business implies first going digital internally and culturally. It means the deeper you can perceive the holistic digital impact, the further you can go digital. The thing that needs some figuring out is how to integrate modern technologies to a business. Make an investment in the top priorities of business and focus on digitizing the fundamental nature of enterprises or businesses. This shows that businesses need to focus on what changes/technology needs to be adopted and what needs to just be bypassed. Digital is the age of innovation. The breadth of innovation management can also tell how progressive is your digital transformation. Innovation is more about taking something someone created and adding to it, changing it, adapting it; in some sense, to a particular need, whether individual, group or industry. Digital innovation has much broader scope than a new product or service, it means both incremental innovation (product update or process optimization) or breakthrough innovation (the new business model or disruptive invention, etc), hard innovations (products/services/business model) and soft innovation (leadership, communication, etc.). When the fountain of creativity flows frictionlessly and innovation is blossom, you are doing great in a progressive digital transformation.
Do the routine check up on the journey of digital transformation. A business organization can only speed up and achieve high performance via seamless execution, by taking the collaboration road; the organization will not be blind to underlying organizational challenges for such as adventure. The highly complex and dynamic digital system needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort. There are systemic consequences and impacts of thinking and actions in terms of interconnections and interdependencies. And this is the philosophy behind any digital transformation.
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