The Digital Transformation Success Formula

Opportunity + Competency + Attitude + Resource + Scale + risk management + Leadership conviction + Maturity = Digital Transformation Success

The organization or company may be in business for many years but has not matured its management disciplines and structural flexibility. The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves and make the digital paradigm shift. The purpose of such radical change is to make a significant difference in improving organizational efficiency, effectiveness, responsiveness, performance, and maturity. Forward-looking organizations are reaching the inflection point from doing digital to being digital. Digital transformation represents a break with the past, having a high level of impact and complexity. Can businesses across sectors figure out their success formulas to make a seamless digital transformation?

Opportunity: The emergence of potential opportunities for exploring digital is likely to follow a nonlinear pattern as the pervasiveness of an organization's digital transformation journey increases. The forethoughtful organizations can refine information to capture business foresight and customer insight, in order to seize the business growth opportunities and predict risks. From the business management perspective, what should be focused on is the integration of information and technology into business decisions and processes, to improve organizational adaptability. Every opportunity has the risk in it, and every risk could also have the opportunity in it. With today’s digital dynamic, uncertainty is only certain, actually the best opportunity in businesses or any field. Because if there is no uncertainty, and then, there will be anarchy. In fact, uncertainty could become an opportunity for running a people-centric business. The point is how to develop a growth mindset with good senses to smell great opportunities and identify critical business issues. It’s also important to take a structural approach to manage ideas, digitize products and services to increase revenue growth and delight customers, and build the differentiated business competencies.

Competency: Every competitive business has a unique set of core competencies to achieve its business goals and reach a high level of performance. A core competency is a harmonization of multiple capabilities such that it permeates the entire organization with a focus, and in alignment with the resource-based view; it’s hard to imitate, and it's the success factor of the business. To build differentiated business competencies, you have to transform the company’s underlying functions and integrate all important business components such as people, process, technology, and culture into cohesive business competencies. Competency-based strategy management has a much higher success rate, and high-competency implies high business maturity. Thus, it’s important to make an objective assessment of business maturity, identify the core competencies for achieving its business strategy. In practice, digital management is an iterative cycle to design, build, scale, and optimize business competencies to achieve desired effects under specified performance standards and conditions.

Attitude: Attitude results from the thoughts and mind, assumptions, and preferences. Behavior is a manifestation of attitude. Those are the result of years of habits and reinforcement. Often, the root cause of change failure is due to the static mindset or inertial attitude. From a business change management perspective, you can certainly change certain behaviors with the right push. Short term behavior changes are common under pressure to change, but it breeds discontent and, in the long term, people will revert to their original habits most of the time. The bigger changes such as digital transformations come with inspiring the mind and challenging the winning attitude. You can’t change anyone’s attitude or behavior, they have to be the ones that change. Attitude changes are adaptive shifts in thoughts or beliefs that result from looking inward and reflecting. Outwardly, attitude is dependent on whether or not they agree with the direction that they need to go. If it's good, then a good attitude will follow. If they disagree, then such resistant minds can lead to negative attitudes and destructive behaviors. Either individually or collectively, attitude is the soft success factor of the digital transformation.

Resource: Organizations exist to enable the deployment of more resources than individuals can. The company management is responsible to achieve the strategic goals by leveraging business resources and overcoming day-to-day uncertainties. Organizations have limited resources, many businesses took a big bite of resources to keep the lights on, only left very little for doing innovation, growing and transforming the business for the long run. In many organizations, resources management becomes a bottleneck for digital transformation success. Thus, how resource allocation is determined should be understood by all important parties. Successful capacity planning and management are critical to ensuring that the resource is available before they are needed. The bottom line is, for any company to succeed, it is essential for the entire company to be pulling in the right direction, A resource allocation scenario needs to be transparent, take advantage of resources effectively, optimize cost, set the right priority, keep the business process transparent, and manage a healthy “run, grow, and transform” portfolio successfully.

Scale: The digital transformation implies the full-scale changes in the way the business is conducted so that simply adopting new digital technology isn’t insufficient. To scale up, organizations must begin thinking about ways with strategic planning to broaden their ecosystems and revenue streams and become more responsive and flexible. In practice, you have to continuously scale up and expand the boundaries, optimize organizational processes and develop business competencies, transform the underlying organizational structures and functions to ensure the business as a whole presenting the differentiated business competency, more superior to the sum of pieces. They can also expand the ability to scale up digital management practices across the digital ecosystem to amplify their digital effect. Leading organizations are able to identify the critical spot to scale up, and leverage the framework approach for reaching the next level of business growth and organizational maturity systematically.

Backup options and risk management: With “VUCA” digital new normal, risk management should be a crucial component of the digital transformation approach. Do things better, faster and smarter. Risk management is like the brake pad, not for stopping the vehicle, but for making the vehicle running faster with safety control. We live in an era, full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. The result is the higher risk of conflict and inertia, Thus, organizations must have solid risk management, provide backup options, and make the transition from risk mitigation to risk intelligence - the accumulation of enough resources to thrive by capturing opportunities in it and adapting to the uncertainty and changes. In fact, digital leaders today need to shape the risk intelligence mindset which can apply risk-based thinking for almost every discipline of digital management, including people management, financial management, asset management, reputation management, customer relationship management, organizational structure design, product or service development and so on.

Leadership conviction: Leadership is about the future and change. Authenticity and strength are important qualities in a leader with conviction. Digital leadership is complex. Although it has many facets, at its core, the foundation of leadership is based on authenticity. The effectiveness of leadership is based on leadership competencies which include multidimensional thinking, creativity, learning agility, decision effectiveness, and problem-solving, etc. Digital leaders are passionate people with high-potential, who can dream, and own that much strength and courage to fulfill their dreams to be a leader. Leadership strength is both innate and can be developed with the right mix of leadership mindset, skillset, and toolset. Leadership maturity directly impacts business competency and maturity.

Business maturity: Digital disruptions are inevitable, and digital transformation is unstoppable. There are different types of organizations and they are at the different stages of the growth cycle in their business maturity. Organizational maturity is assessed based on overall business effectiveness, efficiency, operational excellence, responsiveness, performance, innovation, intelligence, resilience, and people-centricity. Organizations shouldn’t just respond to them in a reactive way. You have to transform the company's underlying functions, processes, cultures, and the organization as a whole at the adjusted digital speed. It is certainly critical to put a stronger emphasis on empowering people, building a strategic roadmap, developing end-to-end business solutions, exploring the source of knowledge, fostering innovations, improving business adaptations and enforcing people-centricity. Otherwise, the company will begin a decline from its previous good performance. The digital transformation implies the full-scale changes in the way the business is conducted. It is the transformation that is reshaping our thinking and recasting the way we view ourselves and the hyperconnected world surrounding us.

The effects of an increasingly digitalized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of organizations. Going digital is more like a journey than a destination. Predicting and preparing the next level of digitalization is iterative learning and doing continuum. The journey of improving business maturity is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Organizations just have to keep experimenting, figure out their own digital transformation formula, and take a continuous journey with adaptation to the digital new normal.

Posted in: Digital Frameworks,Digital Master,Digitalization