An Adaptive Org structure - to support Business Transformation

Sanjeev Kumar, Director & CIO, Apon India

Digital Transformation is a continuous process, thevisibility and impact have become more and more prominent these days. These are triggered because of powerful yet emerging technologies like 5G, AI, ML, Cloud, Mobility, IoT, Blockchain and its unbelievable phenomenal capabilities.  Its speed and magical value impact and possible changes it can bring and disruptions it can create.  

The impact is either on plus side or on minus side but for sure that is going to be far reaching for all in the business or otherwise.  Plus side impact is for those who try to remain a big time agile and grab all possible opportunities of digital transformation coming in their way. They keep reshuffling, restructuring and preparing all the time for grabbing and experimenting with the possibilities be it Processes, People, Organizational Structure, Technologies to improve Customer Experience , Product or Service Creation, Quality, Supply Chain, Delivery and after Sale Service.  

Minus side impact is also obvious, that is auniversal law and is well described in theory of QuantumMechanics. The dark and bright bands. It is for those who are fence sitters, oblivious to surroundings, remain in the state of procrastination for years together, try to see RoI and case studies in all the digital transformation initiatives. They are those who try to drive Digital Transformation as a mere technology initiatives.  

Technologies involved in Digital Transformation are IoT, ML, AL, Cloud, Mobile, 5G, and Blockchain. If we look at them and try to create a value stack, we find that they are deeply connected to one another, dependent on one another and complementary to one another. And each of them is in its respective maturing phase as of now. Organizations are creating solutions around them and adding to their asset repositories. And that evolution will continue with many more upcoming disruptive technologies in future. 

We often come across various bottlenecks once we embark on our digital transformation journey.  Security is one of the major concerns and then network infrastructure and its matured availability across locations and of coursethe much needed skills to make us march ahead with confidence and get winning business results.  

The biggest hurdle we have seen is in our age old organizational structure.  We have not disruptively changed it since more than a decade, just tweaked it a little here and there every time we needed them better.  There is known limitations in reskilling and learning and development outcomes in terms of speed and expertise for making Digital Transformation projects successful.  We still have mostly role based positions and not project based positions in organizations.  Organizations are very slow in augmenting skills-echo-systems with startups, freelancers and experts who have special abilities.  We don’t have process to attract and retain millennials who prefer working with unthinkable flexibilities and mostly with startups.This bottleneck is not only delaying decisions of Digital Transformation but making organizations losing tremendous growth opportunities. 

My recommendation is to disrupt  age old organizational structure, make it flexible,  have room to infuse skills that is project based and create an echo systems forit, encompass specialists from outside based on Digital Transformation initiatives,  add specialists to guide, decide and guard your investments.  These skills are not employable, they are like specialists doctors who prefer visiting different hospitals in given time slots of week days, serve different areas and communities and get better job satisfaction. So let us adapt everything that supports digital transformation to make use of technology evolutions and to accelerate its profitable adoption.