Digital Enterprise and Operations Management

It is already a clear and foregone conclusion that current tools of digital transformation such as global sourcing, IT consumerization and cloud technologies are having and will continue to have a large impact in today’s enterprise. In this respect some companies wonder and assume that some well advertised components of the digital revolution such as Big Data, BYOD or social media are greater then the whole.

At its core, a digital enterprise (large or small) must focus and concentrate on achieving a conjunction of technology and socioeconomics with its consumers. In order to achieve, businesses and CIOs must take an outside-in approach to business process architecture design. To achieve this strategic paradigm companies must rethink how to measure and plan existing KPIs in appropriate contexts of real time. The previous approach of long-term planning cycles of 1-5 year with quarterly adjustments are no longer operational.

As digital related technology progresses and matures its becomes much more capable to handle complex tasks. The follow-up questions I typically receive is quite natural: ‘Why do I need a middle operations management layer when everything is automated?’. My advice has and it still is quite clear: ‘You need people now more than ever.’

This approach will need to blend operational stability with quickness and agility (velocity discussion in previous post) in responding to digital requirements and challenges. The rationale for this is straightforward. To start with digital technologies although very powerful are not quite sufficiently mature yet for full automation. This implies that human skills are quite necessary to continue to develop and strengthen the digital interfaces. After all, for most companies the final consumer is still human. This means that in order to obtain sustainable competitive advantage human interactions are still clearly needed.

Secondly and just as critical; as machine learning technologies grow in complexity and sophistication (such as algorithms) the human skills will need to be adapted to allow for growth in equal measure. Acquiring new talent with the built-in expertise is difficult enough so existing profiles need to be trained for the digital landscape. In this respect, I always note (one of my BIG soap box concerns) and advice that companies should stop competing on skills and learn to hire on individuals. This last point is meant to refer to individuals that can grow and help to grown an organization regardless of the percentage of bullet points in the job profile that match the individuals resume (CV).

Companies should be careful as well to avoid eliminating opportunities for productive human intervention just for the sake of process reduction or lineal expense reductions. This can be especially powerful with service providers as they should look for the best optimization of process automation (digitalization) and customer interactions.

A final note. The digitalization revolution will require good leaders with multiple business skills to develop closer and more frequent interactions with their respective teams. Some leaders in this area have adopted different formats such as daily morning or afternoon team recap meetings. This traditional practices need to be digitally reinforced through tools such as online portals to measure daily targets to help maintain long-term team commitments in digital enterprise environments.

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