Digital Fit
Showing posts with label Digital Fit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Digital Fit. Show all posts

The Monthly “Digital Fit” Book Tuning: The Characteristics of Digital Fit Organization Sep. 2019

Organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation.

The purpose of “Digital Fit: Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit“ is to share insight about multidimensional enterprise fit from digital characteristics, organizational structure, change, knowledge, and talent perspectives; evoke critical and paradoxical thinking about digital “fit vs. misfit,” spark healthy debates on how to define and develop true digital fit, and build a fitting working environment to inspire creativity and accelerate digital transformation.

                  

The Characteristics of Digital Fit Organization 


The Characteristics of “Digital Fit” Organization The digital organization has the very characteristics of velocity, complexity, hyper-connectivity, interdependence, and diversification, etc. It’s a living thing which needs to keep evolving and strike the delicate balance of growth and stability. Different organizations perhaps set varying criteria to evaluate “digital fit.” Here are five characteristics of digital fit organization.

Three Aspects of Organizational Digital Fit The digital business dynamic is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, ambiguity, information overloading, fierce competitions, and continuous disruptions, etc. The companies today have to move fast; the functional, geographical, organizational, and even industrial border are blurred, marketing, finance, technology, leadership, and talent are all intertwined. It’s important to work out a smooth strategy and business transformation by assessing the digital fit of the organization objectively and utilizing collective knowledge and experience to build competitive business advantage.

Three "A"ttributes of High-Mature Digital Organizations With the exponential growth of information and increasing pace of changes, the world keeps on turning, spinning, and innovating around you, and there will be new technologies, new perspectives, new approaches, new tools, new people that will have an impact on your team and your organization almost every day. What are important attributes and characteristics of high-mature digital organizations, and how to develop unique business competency to groom more digital masters?
Three Fitting Characteristics to Make the Business Stand out as a Digital Master With rapid changes and exponential growth of information, companies large or small are brainstorming the digital ways to think and experiment the better way to solve either old business issues or emergent problems, delight customers, improve employees’ engagement, increase productivity, and inspire creativity across the enterprise ecosystem. Organizations have to stretch out in every business dimension for driving the full-fledged digital transformation. So, what are fitting characteristics to make the business stand out as a digital leader and reach a high level of business maturity?

The New Book “Digital Fit - Manifest Future of Business with Multidimensional Fit” Chapter 1 Introduction: The Characteristics of Digital Fit Digital organizations are increasingly exhibiting digital characteristics in various shades and intensity. They are hyper-connected and over-complex, with well-mixed physical workplace and virtual team setting. Like people, every organization has its own personality and digital fit characteristics, how do you define organizational fit, in order to build innovative and high-performing teams and transform the whole organization into the digital master?
The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6000+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. blog posting. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom, to inspire critical thinking and spur healthy debates. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.
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Fair Reasons to Fine-Tune the Organizational Structure

Fine-tuning underlying business structure and processes is a critical step for improving digital business fluidity, flexibility, and overall digital fit,

The digital organization is an integral business system with policies, cultures, work climates, people (employees, customers, partners, etc.) and processes. To keep digital fit, the organization has to keep optimizing its functional or structural design and management pyramid to achieve a high level of autonomy and the state of digital equilibrium. The whole business ecosystem needs to communicate, negotiate and cooperate with each other for catalyzing changes and harnessing innovation. Here are some fair reasons to fine-tune the organizational structure for streamlining digital flow and improving the organizational maturity.

Change in a strategy requires realignment of resources and fine tuning the organizational structure: With increasing speed of changes, the degree of business responsiveness depends on how business systems and subsystems interact with each other, flatter organizational structures will help to speed up the organizational response to changing markets. In the industrial age, many organizations are running in silos, with the top down organizational structure and overly restricted hierarchy which slows down the speed of changes. Limited hierarchy works best in a creative environment where the free flow of ideas and their prompt implementation is a key element of business success. Forward-looking organizations work proactively to dismantle business bureaucracy, experiment with different types of organizational structures to enforce business alignment, enablement, communication, and collaboration, design for trust, and improve the adaptability and maturity of the organization.

Disappointing customer satisfaction results give the management a sense of urgency to fine-tune the organizational structures or processes: The digital era upon us is the age of customer centricity. The challenge for the business across vertical sectors is to fine-tune a successful organizational structure that delivers what customers what and architect an organization to bring value to customers while also creating value for the business itself. To fine tune a customer-centric organization, they need to break down silos, keep information and ideas flow frictionlessly, and manage knowledge holistically so that they can capture almost real time customer insight, tailor customers need, meet their expectations, and adapt to changes with faster speed.

The adoption of new technologies provide companies great opportunities to fine-tune the organizational structure and reinvent the business: In a world that has been transformed by technology, many old and powerful hierarchies became “commoditized.” The latest digital technologies and collaborative tools provide great opportunities for the business to optimize business design, fine tune organizational structures, and improve business maturity. New generations of digital technologies are highly powerful but nimble and lightweight to bridge functional silos and provide omnichannel communications, enabling not only the structured processes of the past but also the unstructured processes of the hyperconnected digital enterprise. Thus, any organizational restructure effort should leverage the emerging digital technologies and platforms for improving cross-functional communication, mass collaboration, and harnessing innovation.

The organizational structure tuning helps to create the chemistry that has a significant impact on productivity, performance and creativity: Organization structure and its impact on business culture could play either a positive or negative impact. The digital workplace needs to be designed to help employees at all levels within an organization, from top leaders to front-line employees, understand and develop their creative capacity to solve problems and explore opportunities in innovative ways. An organization can approach the flow zone when positions in its hierarchy have clear and accountable tasks. Thus, the challenge for any business is to fine-tune a successful structure that helps to empower people and enforce business relationships to unleash the collective potential. The management should do their best to make sure that their personnel is educated, accepting, and eventually investing in that change themselves.

Restructure organization to drive digital transformation: Leading digital transformation is like navigating a ship on the sea, you have to make the timely adjustment for adapting to the changing climate, otherwise, it perhaps causes fatal damages. It’s about setting out goals and working at them in a systematic way for proactively disrupting outdated mindsets, organizational structures, processes, technologies, or cultures. Traditional organizations are often silo-based and strictly hierarchical. The large scale business transformation often requires to fine tune the underlying organizational structures, functions, or culture, etc. Digital leaders are eager to set stages, fine-tune organizational structures that allow the growth mindset and digital culture to bloom so that the business can stretch out in every business dimension for driving a full-fledged digital transformation.

Fine-tuning underlying business structure and processes is a critical step for improving digital business fluidity, flexibility, and overall digital fit, and drive a frictionless, immersive, and relentless digital transformation. The ultimate business goal is to unlock latent expertise, scale innovation, amplify digital impact, and streamline business flow across the organizational ecosystem. Ideally, the digital organizational structure needs to be solid enough to “keep things in order,” but also fluid enough to interact with the expanded digital ecosystem seamlessly.
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The Characteristics of “Digital Fit” Organization

To keep digital fit, the digital transformation efforts need to be undertaken as a means of getting to develop differentiated business competency to accomplish defined change management goals. 


The digital organization has the very characteristics of velocity, complexity, hyperconnectivity, interdependence,and diversification, etc. It’s a living thing which needs to keep evolving and strike the delicate balance of growth and stability. Different organizations perhaps set varying criteria to evaluate “digital fit.” Here are five characteristics of digital fit organization.

Viability: The emergence of opportunities and risks for exploring the path of going digital is like to follow the nonlinear pattern with high velocity and variability. Thus, to keep digital fit, the organization needs to understand itself in relation to its context, appreciate the business attributes such as openness, readiness, integration, diversification, customization, coorpetition (corporation + competition), and make a self-assessment to determine whether it requires designing and optimizing organizational structure or function to become viable. The digital organization as a complex and dynamic system needs to be elaborated in a well-organized effort, take a structural approach to develop differentiated business competencies for adapting to changes and accomplishing defined change management goals. They should also develop a creative workforce to maintain viability.

Balance: Organizations today need to constantly improve the business and seeing change as an opportunity while striking the delicate balance between solid and flow, innovation and standardization, collaboration and competition, and strike the balance of “keeping things simple,” and optimizing complexity to achieve digital equilibrium. The pervasive digital transformation also requires the balance of “old experience” and “new ways to do things,” Thus, digital organizations and their people must learn through their interactions with the business environment, and then, they apply their learning, act, observe the consequences of their actions, make inferences about those consequences, and draw implications for future actions.

IT Savvy: To effectively respond to new digital dynamic and keep digital fit, organizations will be organically and adaptively developed and empowered by digital technologies and abundant information. An IT savvy organization means hyperconnectivity with less wire; hyper-competition with higher capabilities; high-efficiency via automation, hyper-integration via optimization; it can create the information savvy environment that encourages the utilization and flow of information. Thus, an IT savvy organization can rise above the learning curve, capture business insight and improve the organizational responsiveness to keep digital fit.

Innovativeness: Digital is the era of innovation. Organizational innovativeness is the innovation competency of the business. Businesses today have to make the strategic choices all the time of where and when and how they innovate. To keep digital fit, organizations should build a smart system that can “smell” the great ideas at the right time and place, deploy a range of different management technologies and methodologies, and develop the fitting innovation models and portfolios to tailor their own circumstances. Digital fitting organization is like the self-organized but interlaced and hyper-connected ecosystem, there is a paradigm shift that is taking place in generating innovation and building a scalable innovation environment or innovation ecosystem.

Accountability: Digital organizations inspire learning and encourage autonomy. From the business management perspective, digital fit means putting the right people with the fitting mindset and capabilities in the right position to solve the right problems. It’s about how to close the accountability gap and inspire an “every individual as a stakeholder” culture. It is important to run a digital fit business with shared accountability or collective accountability that involves shared ownership, empathetic communication, and continuous improvement. The three pillars of accountability are autonomy, consistency, and resilience. Everyone makes mistakes, and the organization could fail in certain way, the measure of accountability is also on how quickly they can recover and the business as a whole aren’t negatively affected by the breakdown.

To keep digital fit, the digital transformation efforts need to be undertaken as a means of getting to develop differentiated business competency to accomplish defined change management goals. Digital organizations need to emphasize participation, communication, collaboration and realize that organizations will need to renew themselves periodically to cope effectively with change and keep digital fit.
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The Monthly “Digitizing Boardroom” Book Tuning: The Corporate Board’s Digital Fit Sep. 2019

The corporate board plays a significant role in overseeing business strategy, setting effective principles and policies, making sound judgments and assurance of corporate actions within a framework of practical knowledge. 

Modern corporate boards play significant roles in guiding businesses in the right direction and achieve expected business results. Due to the “VUCA” characteristics -Complexity, Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Velocity of the Digital Era, the directorship in any organization must have the agility to adapt to changes and build abilities to advise, inspire and motivate a group of people toward accomplishing shared visions and goals. Here are the multiple perspectives of shaping a strategic boardroom.



                 The Corporate Board’s Digital Fit 




The Corporate Board Change Fit Change is the only constant, and the speed of change is increasing rapidly. The corporate board directors should become interactive change agents that represent the organization, stockholders, and senior management, make significant influences on setting digital tones and shaping the digital mindset of the organization, both walk the talk and talk the walk and set the digital tone for others to follow.

A ‘Fitting’ Board Organizations today have to live up with the business dynamic which is uncertain, ambiguous, complex and flux, Board as high-level governance body plays a crucial role in business advising & monitoring, as well as setting key tones in organizational culture style and leadership quintessential. What does it mean to build a fitting Board, and who is the best fitting BoD, a specialist or a generalist?

The BoD’s Knowledge Fit The corporate board plays a significant role in overseeing business strategy, setting effective principles and policies, making sound judgments and assurance of corporate actions within a framework of practical knowledge. Not only do today’s BoDs need to have sufficient knowledge to understand the business ecosystem, but they also should have the collective insight to present today and foresee the future.

The Corporate Board "Performance Fit" Performances are not just numbers with metrics, they are numbers in context, results related to business goals. Business performance can be affected by numerous factors of which governance is one of them. The corporate board as one of the most crucial governance bodies in the modern enterprise plays an important role in setting digital principles for improving performance management effectiveness and monitoring business performance smoothly.

The Best-in-Class Digital Board Corporate board as the top leadership team plays a significant role in business advising, leadership exemplarity, policy setting, and governance practices. How to build a best-in-class digital board? Is there any way for shareholders and key stakeholders to evaluate board leadership effectiveness?

The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with 6000+ blog posting in 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. The content richness is not for its own sake, but to convey the vision and share the wisdom. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify your voice, deepen your digital footprints, and match your way for human progression.
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The Corporate Board Change Fit

Leadership or directorship is about setting directions and inspiring changes.

Change is the only constant, and the speed of change is increasing rapidly. The corporate board directors should become interactive change agents that represent the organization, stockholders, and senior management, make significant influences on setting digital tones and shaping the digital mindset of the organization, both walk the talk and talk the walk and set the digital tone for others to follow.


Change is the “DNA” of modern leadership: Change starts at the board level. We live in a world where change is the norm and if we don't embrace it, accept it, roll with it or make it happen, we're not going to be successful. While there are many components of leadership, one of the most important ones is the ability to adapt, model and influence change. It is a basic human ability to inspire self and others to look beyond limitations and make continuous improvement. This is particularly important at the board level because board directors help to oversee the business agenda for change and digital transformation, they also must help to push this agenda, pull all important business resources to achieve it. The contemporary corporate board can inspire, innovate, improve, interact, interpret, influence, exemplify, encourage and orchestrate change, as change is often uncomfortable, but a necessary part of reaching the future and sustain the success. 

Change capability is a strategic skill on leadership qualities: While there are many components of leadership, one of the most important ones is the ability to adapt, model and influence change. The leadership team such as corporate board must push the change agenda, and pull the resources to achieve it. We live in a world where change is the norm and if we don't embrace it, accept it, roll with it or make it happen, we're not going to be successful. It also makes it possible for everyone to be on the same page speaking the same language and fosters an atmosphere of accountability. Change leadership concerns the driving forces, visions, and processes that fuel large-scale transformation. Leadership is all about change management and also the ability to take initiative (change leadership). So accepting and embracing change has put leaders more at ease because of its consistency. It's also given digital leaders such as BoDs confidence because you know you are able to positively adapt to any given situation.


The boards of Directors sets policies and principles for changes and digital transformation: Change is the new normal, and the speed of change is increasing, Without well-preparation, major changes in an organization’s ecosystem could have unforeseen consequences that negatively impact the company’s productivity and performance. More than 70% of Change Management effort fails to achieve the expected result. Thus, it is important to bring the CHANGE wave to the boardroom as well. Digital leaders including board directors should contemplate the big "WHY" and know the dynamic of change and adapt to the ever-evolving business circumstances. Change leadership at the board level is important because change management is an interdependent ecosystem that includes many business factors such as the company goals, policies, internal control requirements, customer experience improvements/customer satisfaction, etc, which should be synchronized without compromising the need for any item.

Leadership or directorship is about setting directions and inspiring changes. Change Management has a very wide scope and is a relatively new area of expertise, it needs to focus on coordination and facilitation, follow the right set of principles and take the best or next digital practices.
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The Best “Attitude” Quotes of “Digital Master” Aug. 2019

Digital attitudes are about curiosity and humility. Being experimental and persistent.

"Digital Master” is a series of guidebooks (28 + books) to perceive the multi-faceted impact digital is making to the businesses and society, help forward-thinking organizations navigate through the journey in a systematic way, and avoid “rogue digital.” It perceives the emergent trends of digital leadership, provides advice on how to run a digital organization to unleash its full potential and improve agility, maturity, and provide insight about Change Management. It also instructs the digital workforce on how to shape a game-changing digital mindset and build the right set of digital capabilities to compete for the future. Here is a set of “Attitude” quotes in “Digital Master."


1 Attitude is the compilation and quality of thought transposed to the brain of its personality and mindset, which is moving through human existence.

2 Attitude manifests itself through one's behavior. It can be changed for sure only if one is willing to accept and give 100 percent to changing oneself.

3 Attitude is a vibration...a frequency our human personality carries within it that it exudes around and then affects the world outside through the frequency of this vibration.

4 Attitude is a way of thinking and a way of looking at the problem. Attitude manifests itself through one's behavior.

5 The differentiator between a digital leader/professional and a laggard is not about the title and authority, more about the digital mindsets and attitude: the intellectual curiosity, risk tolerance, persistence, creativity, learning agility, humility. Etc.

6 We all try to 'close' the system, so to say, to reduce its complexity. But the adaptive attitude is to manage its complexity via agility enhancement.

7 Digital attitudes are about curiosity and humility. Being experimental and persistent.

8 Professional competency is built through both attitude and aptitude. Competency is related to the performance and the outcome.

9 With overwhelming information and abundance of knowledge, one of the true tests of a professional is to know when you don't know, cultivate healthy digital attitudes to practice a profession and improve professional quality.
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