Reimagining Your Organisation

In his book The Digital Transformation Playbook David Rogers says “Digital Transformation is fundamentally not about technology but about strategy. Although it may require upgrading your IT architecture, the more important upgrade is to your strategic thinking.” He goes on to say, “Today, digital leadership requires the ability to reimagine and reinvent that business itself.’’

In their book Digitizing Government, authors Brown, Fishenden and Thompson state, “To be truly effective, digitizing government involves reimaging the way in which Governments design and deliver services.”

But, how do you reimagine your business, your service, your organisation without creating chaos? How do you bring your organisation with you on what is bound to be a very new journey? How do you deal with risk? How do you develop new capabilities while maintaining business as usual?

The answer is that you need to operate within a Digital Transformation Framework, which establishes a strategy based on diagnosing the challenges, establishing guiding policies and setting out coherent action. The Digital Transformation Framework must focus on the needs of customers or citizens, must address the culture and capabilities of the organisation and allow the leaders to ensure the implementation of the strategy.

John Kotter, in his book “XLR8”, advocates setting up a dual system whereby the current business of the organisation continues to be managed by the existing managerial hierarchy and a new network structure is established alongside. Volunteers within the organisation are then given the freedom to operate within a more dynamic environment, allowing innovation and new ways of working to develop and be tested before merging the two systems together.

This is good advice, especially within larger organisations, but a Digital Transformation Framework will still be required to ensure all issues are dealt with in structured and safe way. It is not just about creating a more dynamic environment and allowing staff freedom to be innovative! Unless there is a ‘Golden Thread’ linking your strategy and actions together you could be taking the wrong action and making it… wronger! (Apologies to Blackadder.)

For more information on the importance of a Digital Transformation Framework you can follow this link where we also talk about our own framework, what each stage of it means and how to use it within your business or organisation to not only reimagine it, but to reinvent it.

To stay up-to-date with the latest our latest thoughts and guiding advice on using a Digital Transformation Framework, subscribe to our YouTube channel for weekly updates and Live Stream discussions on Digital Transformation.

Read more by Niall McKeown, here

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