“Digital Master” Book Monthly Tuning: Strengthen the Weakest Link in Digital Transformation May. 2017

Digital makes a significant impact on every aspect of the business from people, process to technology, both horizontally and vertically. Digital becomes the very fabric of high performing business, being outside-in and customer-centric is the new mantra for forward-looking and high mature digital organizations today. At the heart of digital, it is people and how to build a customer-centric organization. But how to assess the digital fitness of your organization for such a paradigm shift.       Strengthen the Weakest Link in Digital Transformation  Strengthen The Weakest Link in Digital Transformation? Digital transformation is reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we view ourselves, the digital ecosystem of which we are the part of the environments in which we live, and the way we think and solve problems. Either business or the world is transforming from siloed functions, the sum of pieces into a connected whole. Hyper-connectivity is the most critical digital characteristics. Hence, it is important to understand that digital business development is a multifaceted and holistic management discipline. It is the paradigm shift which takes a multidisciplinary approach. In practice, how to identify and strengthen the weakest links in order to drive the digital transformation seamlessly.
Three Roadblocks in Digital Transformation: Transformation is to change the “nature” of something. Transformational change involves a complete end to end change, including organizational culture. It required commitment from the senior leadership that is often lacking. More often, over and over is that very few people understand what has to change and how to go about it in driving business transformation. Others actually do not want to change; it is just a lip service. So what are the key steps in identifying the kind of business transformation required?.Make Digital Leap via Closing Three Blind Spots Digital means changes, it brings unprecedented opportunities and numerous risks. Being static is no longer a choice for today’s digital professionals or businesses. If you do not move fast enough to adapt to changes, you already lag behind. Furthermore, digital dynamic also creates many blind spots and generate quite a few gaps because of its “VUCA” characteristics - Velocity, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity, also because different individuals and organizations evolve digital in the different speed. So how to drive the business in the fast lane and take digital leap via closing those fatal blind spots?
De-Risk IT Management in Digital Transformation: IT plays a significant role in the digital transformation because it is in the unique position to oversee business processes and understand the underlying function of the organization. Therefore, IT will possess the company's widest breadth of view. At the age of digitalization, opportunities and risks are coexisting. The CIO will make an objective evaluation of the IT organization's effectiveness, and take a periodic risk assessment, identify the barriers and chasms for achieving operational excellence, take the stepwise approach to improve overall IT maturity and catalyze digital transformation.
Do we Handle Problems at the Level of the Mindset, or Shall We? We live in the rapidly changing digital era full of paradox: on the one side, human world is running at internet speed, the physical distance is no longer the barrier to separate the world, the information is only a click away, the knowledge cycle is significantly shortened; on the other hand, people’s minds, mainly shaped in their early age, with change inertia, are far lagging behind the era we live in, they turn to be the true obstacle to distance the heart and stop human progress. And it is also the deep root cause of many business and societal problems. So would it be possible to handle the problems at the level of the mindset, but how?
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