Fostering Digital Agility for Organizational Digital Transformation

Fostering  Digital Agility for Organizational Digital Transformation

Dr.Umut KÖKSAL,Founder,UK Danışmanlık

 Digital Transformation is such a concept that we have been talking,discussing about in every platform…

If this terms has to be underlined, it has to be matched with another term that is called ‘'Digital Agility''.

For sustainable digital transformation, as an enterprise your executives need to have the spirit and understanding  of ‘'digital agility''.

Digital agility has three main components:

·         Hyperawareness

·         Informed Decision-making

·         Fast Execution

Hyperawareness is such an ability of the company to monitor changes in the competition,in other words in business environment. It is also part of company's proactive understanding of business, business oriented attitudes that are directly related with the internal and external environments' threats and opportunities.

Internal scope is not enough, both internal and external scope are crucial for understanding the context of digital agility.

Second component, informed-decision making(1) is an ability of a company to make the best decision possible in a given situation. Speed of decision-making is also important for this component. Company's future is directly affected by strategic,crucial decisions. Corporate innovation is also influenced by these proactive,accelerated decisions or decision-making processes.

 There are five main obstacles to agility) and one of them is the speed of decision-making. Others are operational silos,organizational resistance,unaligned processes and poor knowledge management(2).

 Digital transformation is directly related with fostering a business atmosphere focuses on customer experience, maintaining a motivation in order to make an organization or a system more efficient,effective by implementing faster working methods,implementing  innovative business models defined by digital technology.

 In order to manage this and be winner at the end of this, organization needs hyperawareness and acceleration in the process of decision-making. Decision-making should be supported by the assertive behaviors of the managers of the organization.

Because we have to be aware of the fact that experiencing successfull digital transformation also includes some barriers that bring difficulties for digital agility implementation:

·         Resistance to change organizational climate or culture

·         Trying to combine agile work-place elements with non agile work-place elements

·         Budget constraints

·         Talent/Human Capital constraints

·         Management support etc.

Third component is fast-execution. Fast-execution means resources and processes. Resources are factors that are proactively managed in terms of capital and technology. In this context, talent and potential management are two crucial factors for sustaining fast-execution. Fast execution is a puzzle that has pieces needed to be solved in a short time. Short time and with proactive behaviors.

In a global business environment defined with hypercompetition, maintaining agility in human capital and technology is important. Not only resources but also processes of the organization are the factors that have to be examined carefully.

If we consider digital transformation only from technology perspective, we make a mistake. Digital transformation and digital agility relationship should be discussed via management and organization design perspective.

All the departments in the organization must açt as the accelerators of agility motivation. HR,Finance, Sales,Marketing,Production Planning,Production,Quality and of course IT…

Workforce analytics,An organization that has roots on ‘'learning organization'',innovative process development methods and so on…. They all act as the core elements of the organizational side of perserving digital agility…

Organization's executives should know that in order to talk about digital transformation, organization need to stress agility in terms of strategy,structure,culture,leadership,learning, retention,innovative processes and corporate innovation and of course IT infrastructure and data.

Agile execution, Agile Leadership, Agile Organizational Structure, Agile HR Processes, Agile Understanding of Work Processes.

Transformation without agility means fail…

 

References

(1)    https://www.imd.org/dbt/insights/digital-transformation-dba/

(2)    https://www.bpinetwork.org/thought-leadership/views-commentary/415/what_s_slowing_down_your_organization_s_agility

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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