Introduction|In the era of digital technology, when enterprises are undergoing digital transformation, facing the rapidly changing market environment, how should they adjust their top-level design, organizational model, talent model, and cooperation ecology to stand out from the encirclement and achieve long-term development? Today, we specially invited Mr. Xu Bin, Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of CIFI Group, and Tencent Cloud TVP Industry Ambassador. He will explain the development trend of the new era of digital technology for us from multiple dimensions such as strategy, organization, and ecology, and help us more fully understand the pain points behind digital transformation and the way to break the situation.
About the Author
Xu Bin, Tencent Cloud TVP Industry Ambassador, Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of CIFI Group. With 27 years of IT management experience in Fortune 500 companies, he has served as the CIO of many top global companies such as Country Garden, Cedar, Shell, and BP in the global and Asia-Pacific regions. DAMA China's first Certified CDO, IDC China's first top ten leaders, and has won many honors such as China's best CIO and CDO. Co-founded China's first big data industry alliance and the first data innovation base D-lab, and served as the chairman of the real estate CIO alliance. An angel investor in corporate services, an in-depth participant in the innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, and an entrepreneurial mentor. His translations include: "Big Data Management - The Way of Enterprise Transformation and Upgrading and Reshaping Competitiveness", "VERISM Transformation and Innovation in the Digital Era", etc.
1. Top-level design of digital transformation
The success of an enterprise can be summarized by "721", that is, 70% of success comes from the choice of the correct strategy and direction, choosing the right direction, 20% comes from the correct product and good customer service, and 10% comes from the refined ability of operation and operation, which is the competitiveness that makes the company stand out in the market and industry.
At present, all walks of life are undergoing digital transformation, and the help and problems it brings to enterprises are worth discussing. In digital transformation planning, there are multiple issues that require our attention. First of all, what problems can digital transformation solve? Second, what is the relationship between digital transformation and business strategy? Third, what are the success criteria for digital transformation? What is the relationship between digitization and informatization? Finally, what is the role of the consumer in digital transformation?
At the level of digital transformation planning, two important issues for enterprises need to be resolved. First of all, how to implement the business strategy of the enterprise? In the era of digital technology, enterprises need to acquire agile and market-oriented capabilities to cope with the challenges of rapid market changes. Second, how to improve enterprise business tactics? Digital transformation requires simultaneous thinking with enterprises to help enterprises achieve lean operations and refined management, so as to further improve net profit margins and industry competitiveness.
As the person in charge of enterprise digitalization, you need to think about these issues every day, and constantly explore the best practices of digital transformation, so as to help enterprises achieve strategic synchronization. In digital transformation, business strategy and digital strategy are closely linked. In business strategy formulation, core business capabilities need to be transformed into digital capabilities to form a digital strategy. This process is not a one-way dependent relationship. Digital transformation needs to find new means and methods from the two-way interaction between business strategy and technological vision to achieve business goals and capabilities, so as to create agile, market-oriented digital capabilities.
It is worth noting that the success criteria of digital transformation can be considered from both strategic and tactical perspectives. From a strategic perspective, digital transformation needs to help companies improve their capabilities in the agile market and achieve business goals and capabilities in the face of an uncertain future. From a tactical perspective, digital transformation needs to help companies improve their operating results, such as increasing net profit margins, and requires us to stand on a global perspective to achieve overall end-to-end optimization, thereby achieving process reengineering and improvement of operating results.
However, in the process of digital transformation, the demand problems solved by many systems are also inappropriate. The reason is that the person who raised the demand is obviously the operation layer rather than the management level. This not only fails to solve the problem of core business indicators, but will reduce efficiency. Digital transformation requires an overall, end-to-end process vision approach to optimize and improve business, so as to truly promote the success of digital transformation.
The relationship between informatization and digitization has been mentioned many times in discussions. Generally speaking, informatization is to solve the problem of operational efficiency, while digitization is to solve the problem of management decision-making. Although many systems are currently able to solve efficiency problems, most of these systems can only be used by employees, and it is not common among bosses and managers such as CEOs and CFOs.
In digital transformation, there are three main types of consumers: external consumers, internal customers (digital customers), and employees. Internally, digital transformation should not only provide better services for external customers, but also empower internal customers (such as CEOs, CFOs, etc.) with innovative capabilities, so that companies can better build future-oriented strategic management capabilities. In addition, digital transformation should also evaluate its actual value and sustainable development through the experience of employees, so that all employees of the company will be happier and more satisfied with our existence.
Therefore, in the process of enterprise practice, even in terms of operation management, whether digital transformation can meet the needs of employees and whether they like to use it or not are the core criteria, and we should not only focus on technical indicators and efficiency issues.
2. New model of organization and talent in the digital age
The new organizational model in the digital age must be a flexible liquid organization, because it needs to adapt to the rapidly changing market, so that the organization and personnel can be adjusted in time according to market changes. In the future, even a considerable part or more than half of the employees may be partners. It is conceivable that the personnel organized in the entire market may become a studio to provide services for multiple companies. Therefore, internal and external resources in the organization need to form a rapid collaborative linkage to achieve goals together. With the help of good tools and technologies, we can make liquid tissues operate effectively, so as to achieve the purpose of quickly adapting to the market.
As we all know, one of the hallmarks of an agile organization is that personnel changes do not affect organizational efficiency. In the digital age, we need to build talent pools so that we can reorganize resources when the market changes. In addition, it is also necessary to establish a minimum combat unit, and all work tasks can be completed through a triangular organization. At the same time, they need to grow into full-stack talents to provide more opportunities for resource reuse and continuous growth. In addition, as a business unit, the organization needs to continuously improve capabilities, improve service efficiency and iteration capabilities, and meet customer needs; at the same time, business units need to continuously improve talent training, efficiency, standardization and automation capabilities to achieve efficiency improvements.
In the current era of digital technology, enterprise talents need to have keen technological insight, be able to perceive the core strength of the future and apply technology to corporate decision-making, including building agile capabilities and effectively using data to better achieve sustainable development.
At the strategic level, top-level strategic capabilities no longer only focus on market share and development direction, but more on the ability to adapt to the future. For management, they need to have the ability to apply data and empower innovative organizations, turn data into assets, provide support and space for business improvement, and at the same time stimulate and enhance the innovation awareness and capabilities of innovation units.
Digital transformation mainly depends on the specific promotion of digital managers including CDO and CIO. The strategic capabilities involved and the ability to communicate with management are the core. It is very important to use a consistent language system when communicating with management. Including understanding the differences between business requirements and technical implementation to ensure effective communication and cooperation and avoid communication barriers caused by different language systems. In actual promotion, learn to use the new language system to speak, and focus on how to achieve business goals, rather than just focusing on how to complete technical tasks.
3. The new ecology of cooperation in the digital age
In the digital age, building cooperative and ecological capabilities is crucial. An organization's resources are very limited, and it cannot rely on internal forces to complete innovation. Therefore, building ecological capabilities becomes very necessary. Ecology is actually to build a circle with more reliable helpers.
In my opinion, the establishment of a new cooperative ecology in the digital age mainly includes the following three points:
First of all, we need to have an in-depth insight into the market, understand related fields, and connect all companies and partners in this field. If we establish connections with entrepreneurs and start-up companies in this field, we will have more capabilities that can be used.
Secondly, the establishment of a win-win situation is very important. We need to cross the gap, especially the early innovators in the industry. They are often pioneers in the industry. When our business scenarios are combined with their technology, we can create value together to achieve a win-win situation.
It is worth mentioning that it is also very important to become a KOC or KOL in the industry. Opinion leaders can quickly dispatch and connect resources to provide more value to partners, and they will also provide value in reverse. This two-way relationship is also the key to sustainable development. Continuously creating win-win value is the key to operating the ecology. Let each team member have ecological thinking and become a small KOC or connector. For example, if an enterprise has 1,000 IT personnel and 10,000 employees, of which 9,000 work in the market, then one person connects nine, and the enterprise can become an ecological organization with 10,000 employees. In the digital age, building ecological capabilities will help us better cope with the unknown future and use optimal resources to achieve corporate strategic goals.
At present, digital transformation has become the only way for the development of enterprises. In the digital age, enterprises need to start from the top-level design to establish a new organizational model, new talent model and new cooperation ecology in the digital age. The new organizational model in the digital age needs to be driven by innovation and actively change to adapt to the changes and complexity of the digital age; the new talent model in the digital age also needs continuous innovation to cultivate talents with digital skills and thinking to adapt to the rapidly changing digital environment; enterprises in the digital age need to establish a new cooperation ecology and rely on ecological synergy to achieve win-win value.
Therefore, enterprises must deeply understand the importance of digital transformation, and actively implement various measures of digital transformation, so as to overcome the obstacles of the digital age and adapt to the development of the digital age.