Thursday, January 23, 2020

Change-Readiness with Synthesis of Socio-Technical Systems-Perspectives

The organizations that have hit the heights of success in the digital world aren’t those that have determinedly followed the old models and ways of thinking.

We are living in a complex world in which inventions, developments, and conflicts are continuously changing and that makes it impossible to have complete knowledge and understanding of many issues facing the business today.

Organization design is an integral piece of business Change Management. It’s the vehicle through which the business strategy is executed and define the environment where the talent can unleash the potential. Making an objective change impact assessment is an important step in building the organizational level change management competency and achieving high-performance business results. Thus, change readiness is an important indicator of the business competency at the organizational level. Here is the change readiness with the synthesis of Socio-Technical Systems (STS) perspectives.

Sociological perspective: In the industrial business reality, functional silos are generally constant barriers to business advancement or maturity, stifle changes, and lock individual or collective performance. It is a waste of resources to leave any invaluable human potential left unrecognized, untapped and unused. One approach is to create social hubs - pull information and activities from enterprise applications into the social platform to create a central hub for collaborative, task-based, and social activities.

Organizations can leverage collaboration tools to make formerly invisible patterns of social interaction more visible; and apply such information to boost social engagement, encourage new conversations that galvanize inspiration and gain traction on a powerful theme of renewal and growth, co-create new knowledge, stimulate innovative ideas, and improve collaboration, communication, cooperation, and coordination.

More often, organizations are too siloed to be able to relate coherently as a holistic business to the customer's journey. Collaboration is at its essence, the intellectual harmony between humans. With continuous changes and disruptions, the business can only be built on the belief of serving personal growth and providing tools or enabling digital frameworks that allow employees to become better or more capable persons, or to have the organization as a whole become more agile and mature.

Technical perspective: The emerging digital technology and collaboration tools bring unprecedented opportunities for companies to reinvent themselves by optimizing the organizational structure and improving underlying functional efficiency. Technology centrism becomes multidisciplinary. It is true that technology grows exponentially even in the case of the digital paradigm shift. It is also true that the growth of technology may trigger a paradigm shift. How the social and technical aspects of a workplace fit together directly impact the effectiveness and maturity of the company. Ideally, the physical organizational structure, relationships, and digital platforms and social connections wrap around each other to ensure clear responsibility, smooth information flow, and engaged workforces who can set the right priority to accelerate performance.

One of the biggest challenges of social technology is how to manage or curate the volume and variety of artifacts that workers create using social tools. Technically speaking, social technology has the potential to address several perennial goals for effective communication and efficient collaboration in a flexible and low-cost way. Social technologies enable social behaviors to take place online, endowing these interactions with scale, speed, and disruptive economics, provide platforms for content creation, distribution, consuming, co-creation and transformation of personal and group communication into the content.

Systems perspective: The digital organization is hyper-connected and interdependent, the linear system perception needs to be replaced by complex adaptive systems, a goal-seeking system becomes purposeful, and technical behavior needs to be replaced by socio-technical behavior. It’s very important for any high performing organization to leverage the systematic understanding of interconnectivity, get the best alignment and leverage the great human potential that exists or is needed to achieve great results and to tap into the passion of the people.

There's no easy panacea for improving organizational maturity. What now has to be understood are the complex dynamics of the ecosystem within which the business is competing and with which the business is unavoidably entangled - dynamics driven more by horizontal linkages than by vertical accountabilities. The systematic perspective brings greater awareness of the intricacies and the systemic value of digital organizational systems, processes, people dynamics, technology, resource allocation, supply-side variables, market variables, economies of scale, etc. The “whole systems” approach will transcend into an “interconnected systems “ approach - an integration of across local and global business, social, technological, economic, political, and ecological systems.

The organizations that have hit the heights of success in the digital world aren’t those that have determinedly followed the old models and ways of thinking; it’s those that have forged a new path. An objective change management assessment with the synthesis of Socio-Technical Systems against the contexts of business goals, people, processes, procedures, infrastructure, technology, and culture enables the business management leveraging a structural approach to align people, process, and technology to make change happen not only on the structural level but also on the cultural and behavior level for achieving people centricity and improving the overall organizational maturity.








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