Insightful leaders can innovate, integrate and interact, to ensure that collective potential is unlocked and the journey of human societies is reaching the next level of advancement.
Digital era upon us is full of uncertainty, velocity, complexity, and ambiguity. The effects of an increasingly digitized world are now reaching into every corner of businesses and every aspect of human society.
IT as integrator: Business paradigm is shifting from an industrial era to an information-abundant digital era. Information is the gold mine all forward-thinking organizations dig to capture business foresight and customer insight. In order to break down overly restrictive organizational hierarchy and bridge silos. Effective information management is a digital integrator to build differentiated business competency, orchestrate business solutions and deliver results quicker, consistently. To run a highly responsive and high-performance information-based digital business, the seamless rhythm of IT and business integration combined with the process maturity ensures information consistency, interoperability, and reliability.
To keep information relevant, accessible, and knowledge updated, an essential role for information integrators is the need to connect ideas but also people, having an integral information and knowledge management approach. Running a high-responsive organization needs to get support across the organizational boundaries and integrate all critical business factors into the organizational changeability. It’s a seamless integration of people, process and technology for running a holistic information savvy organization.
Business architecture as an integrator: In most traditional companies, functions have a natural tendency to become isolated organizational silos, focusing on their own excellence and performance instead of the company’s strategy holistically. Each silo function is a piece of puzzle. Thus, business architecture glues up cross-functional teams; it is also an integrator of silos to complete the picture and solve the puzzle holistically.
In management practice, many functional teams are good at many things, but great at nothing. Business architecture glues cross-functional teams to build trust and harness cross-boundary collaboration to solve problems holistically. Integration is a critical step in optimizing business processes, capabilities, capacities for developing a set of differentiated and dynamic organizational competency to ensure seamless strategy execution.
Global leadership as an integrator: There are many multidimensional companies, but very few global ones. Innovative global leaders are structural integrators who can diverge, converge the multitude of ideas, thoughts, perspectives; who can leverage the artistic and scientific discipline to design, invent and innovate; who can defer, infer the multipath logic of scenarios, stories, myth & truth insightfully; who can enjoy and integrate variety of knowledge, culture, or experience into something fresh, etc. They are influential communicators to facilitate world-wide dialogues and passionate coaches to cultivate more great leaders and professionals.
Global integrators will not reinvent the wheel, but demonstrate cultural empathy, philosophical wisdom, cross-domain knowledge fluency and sophisticated taste to break things down and bind things up accordingly. They are confident and humble at the same time, ask insightful questions, facilitate continuous dialogues, and come up with integral strategies, solutions, and practices. They can innovate, integrate and interact, to ensure that collective potential is unlocked and the journey of human societies is reaching the next level of advancement.
There are both old and new, physical and virtual things co-existing in today’s digital organizations. Business management needs to break down silos, try to see the ‘big picture’ and take a more holistic view of the business as a system, update their “divide and conquer” methodologies, take a holistic, integral, and iterative approach to go digital, to make sure that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, refining business success factors to practice digital management disciplines holistically.
