Digital organization, a challenge to deal with and win

Digital_Innovation

We living in the middle of digital revolution, led by global and sharing economy, which dramatically transforming the business world supported via pervasive utilization of digital technologies.
This new business pattern involve the evaluation of new organizational models and structures in order to follow this trend in perfect harmony.

The applied theory of “business” evolution by natural selection is nowadays focused around innovation capacity and learning, professional training able to realize quality based products and competitive diversification.
Resistance to change is the best challenge to win when you specially deal with “local cultures” and old fashioned and historical enterprise.

This strong detachment between business and organizational models depicts the best and most dangerous threat to the future enterprises life, estimates of expert analysts moreover states that many professions will changes and disappear or become precarious.

What kind of risks and disadvantages brings an old organizational model in and what are the benefits and opportunities in a new model instead?

Keep organization as agile and small as you can is a “simplest” and best approach ever because this gives inexpensiveness, mobility, agility, low risk appetite able to dare and quick decision making process but reduce the market penetration and big project contracts ordering, decrease the index of trust by customer perception even in case of well matched competences.

How can exploit opportunities and mitigate the risks in this way?

Let’s try to think in “virtual”, also in “digital” way

During Cyber Security Symphosium event held in Lugano, 22th September 2016, I was impressed by Adrian Burden and his speech about organizational clusters born in 2011 in UK, around Malvern, aiming to support and manage the growth of Cyber Security business, improving the defense and raise the awareness in local enterprises.

Founded in 2011 by 8 small enterprises today has grown up to 10 times obtaining important benefits such as:
– improved awareness of everyone’s potential and complementarity
– regular collaboration (meetings, targets, goals)
– trusted relationships
– effective resource sharing
– major interest by investors, pubblicity and government
– business growth

This model has been replicated in other countries and contests; more than model we should replicate the concept able to overcome lobbies and business network structures such as the famous and inflated BNI.

Speaking about networking is too restrictive, better to speak about Virtual Enterprise or digital organization, a web search helped my to find a complete meaning of virtual enterprise:

a temporary alliance of business that come together to share skill or core competences and resources in order to better respond to business opportunities, and whose cooperation is supported by digital technologies integrated usage

Another interesting definition states:

a temporary network of indipendent companies, suppliers, customers – even rivals – linked by information technologies to share costs, skills and access one another’s markets without a central office, neither organizational chart nor hierarchy, nor legal agreements to extend own competitive limits

What are the reasons of its success?
Cultural differences between UK and us, resistance to change, others?

I think it’s a concrete opportunity really to exploit, together with a risk analysis, and to live up to end with belief and real sense of team working, just because all the ingredients are “ready to be used”.

References:

Malvern Cyber Security
Wikipedia: Virtual Enterprise
Special thanks to:
Adrian Burden speaker and Malvern Cluster representative


Cherubini Andrea, i3CT
ICT Consultant
http://icnhub.com/andrea-cherubini/