How can IT Evolve to Investigate different paths for the potential future of the Organization?

The emergent digital technologies and tools provide the business new opportunities to reimagine the future of businesses. Digital is the age of customers. Innovation leaders need to realize that continuous adaptability is necessary in a continuously changing world. IT plays a crucial role in leading digital transformation of the business. So, how can IT evolve to investigate different paths for the potential future of the organization?


Leverage the powerful collaboration tools to well-mix the physical and virtual team to build the digital hybrid organization: The digital organizations today are always on and hyperconnected.  The digital technologies such as enterprise social platform provide the unprecedented opportunity for cross-functional and cross-geographic communication and collaboration. It provides a more intensive and effective working environment enabling the organization to get all the right talented people in tackling challenges from all right angles all at once, for brainstorming and coming out the optimal solutions.In practice, the overly rigid hierarchical structure will transcend into “network structures.” Innovative organizations also build institutional platforms that across digital ecosystem for evolving customers and business partners and building longer-term business relationships. Sustaining long-term collaboration allows participants to develop subject knowledge over time and focus more directly on business objectives to digital business strategy and digitally enabled innovation and transformation. It’s about engaging specialized talent so they can converse in ways they wouldn’t be able to on their own for co-solving tough business problems in a collaborative way.
IT is the backbone of the hyperconnected digital organization in which employees at all levels are inspired and allowed to commit their best: IT can be very valuable for performing a wide array of business solutions, including process optimization and measurement, segment analysis, strategic positioning, and a wide array of other business functions. IT should also become trusted business partner by transforming business requirement to the organizational design and process management so that the organization can think in the longer term, and the business vision and goals can be realized smoothly. When business management evolves IT to investigate the different path for the potential future of the organization, IT should provide the comprehensive oversight of underlying business functions and processes and take a more holistic approach to building the high mature digital organization with digital attributes such as responsiveness, adaptability, information availability, speed, innovation, etc.
Develop the best and next practices in turning organization structure and harnessing innovation: More and more firms are learning and implementing best practices in innovation. IT is the threshold to build innovation as the crucial business capability. Because any practice is always a combination of both people and process, and how they are used to doing things in an optimal way in the organization. IT can weave all the necessary business elements into the critical business capability. There is a recognizable core of approaches and business activities that produce profitable innovation, thus, IT can become the innovation hub of the organization for developing and managing the best and next practices in a structural way, to investigate the different path of the future of organization; to explore the alternative solutions to both emergent and old problems; to reinvent IT itself from a support function to the digital growth engine, and scale the best/next innovation practices to the entire company. The high-innovative organizations need to also learn from other innovative companies across the industrial sectors, as well as develop the tailored best practices to fit for its own circumstances.
The digital paradigm that is emerging is the digital organization that is organic, vibrant, energetic, fluid, innovative and holistic. Re-imaging the future of business is exciting, but investigating the different path for unleashing business potential needs to take a systematic approach and develop it into a more solid form. IT is the linchpin for connecting the wider dots, also developing the logical practices for leading the organization toward the deep, deep digital reality.



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