Organizational maturity is not only about technical excellence, process efficiency, effectiveness, efficiency, but also about business agility, innovation, intelligence, and people-centricity.
Running a business is an iterative business continuum. The digital era upon us is about choice, innovation, people-centricity. It provides the opportunity for business leaders to think the new way to do things, forcing them to get really creative on how they architect and implement change, how they handle the investigation of innovative business solutions, to change the business’s perception, reinvent the business to become more organic, alive, vibrant, energetic, responsive, fluid, and innovative.
Architecture & strategy: The companies today move so fast, marketing, finance, IT, talent, and leadership are all intertwined. Business Architecture that defines the means for the strategy and contains the organizational context, is strategic in that it gives direction to the business design and transformation. It brings a systematic understanding of relationships, ecosystems, market dynamics, and the connections between related business functions. The development of robust business strategies is greatly aided by leveraging business architecture to improve strategy management effectiveness.
Business strategy helps to diagnose real business problems, set guidelines, make choices and take actions. Business Architecture should help to leverage multi-choices of strategy, bridge strategy and execution. That means even if there’s only one destination but it may have multi-routes to get there and improve the promising alternative. Strategy implementation begins with a rich problem framing process that delivers robust strategic choices defined as executable sets of resource allocation decisions. Business Architecture contributes to architect business in the transition to the strategic state defined in the strategic planning via seamless integration, to ensure that the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces.
Strategy & intelligence: Information is the grist for strategy; intelligence defines the strategy. In the context of an organization, information is representation of organizational entities including human beings and processes. Business intelligence, which is defined as capacity for learning, reasoning, understanding relationships, facts, meanings, etc, has a multidimensional impact such as assisting in prioritizing business problems or opportunities, enabling better decision-making, and strategic problem-solving.
Running an intelligent organization is all about transforming information into business insight and foresight to improve business agility and maturity. Without intelligence, strategy is dumb; without strategy, intelligence lacks of purpose. Technically, intelligence is captured through leveraging analysis tools to process abundant information to achieve certain values in better management and governance. With the application of intelligence, it is the aggregation, assessment, and refinement of information that creates the intelligence required to define the rules and strategies driving the business forward effectively.
Intelligence & investment: There are both opportunities and risks for every investment; visibility into each investment is established to provide ongoing investment health information as well as enable understanding overall portfolio health. Without intelligence, investment could be costly. Making wise investment presents a greater challenge and reward by pioneering the development of new products, services, processes, or business models, etc. It’s crucial to evaluate the impacts of investment decisions by presenting a strategic look, and do insightful analysis to maximize the business’s benefit from the investment.
Great investment managers ask insightful questions to make an objective assessment of their investment portfolio: the impact of ideas, the practicality and scalability of business models, cost/risk analysis, return on investment, etc., achieve portfolio agility to anticipate and respond to changing market conditions. They are able to align the business activities that have a three-way impact – Revenue, Cost and Investments at the same time by choosing an environment to compete to achieve higher-than-expected performance results.
Organizations today need nothing less than a paradigm shift in their thinking about the fundamentals of how organizations work, as well as how to build an ever-evolving intelligent organization. Organizational maturity is not only about technical excellence, process efficiency, effectiveness, efficiency, but also about business agility, innovation, intelligence, and people-centricity.
