Digital transformation – 8 inside characteristics of the modern & digital organizations

The pandemic has changed the dynamics of almost every kind of business. And today, most businesses have no choice but to transform themselves through technology to reach their customers and continue their existence.

Digital transformation is not a new concept. Probably, it's one of the most overused terms in recent times, especially during the last couple of years. Every other company is either getting digitally transformed, or helping others get transformed, or both.

However, have you ever thought about what a ‘transformed’ organization looks like? What are the characteristics of a modern and a digitally transformed organization? How does a ‘Digitally transformed’ organization function and work, to continue the agility that they have gained through the transformation?

Here are 8 characteristics or principles of the ‘Modern and Digitally transformed’ organization. These principles define how these companies operate internally, how their employees and teams see the organization from inside.

Simple

For digitally transformed organizations, the size of the company does not matter for their IT operations. Whether the company size is 500 people, or 50,000 people, these companies do not find it hard to scale their internal operations and business processes.

The internal organization complexities are hidden behind simpler interfaces and intuitive business processes. They provide great working experiences to the employees, customers, and guests alike.

The access to their core systems and services are easily available to build better interfaces and experiences for their internal business operations and customer facing processes.

Flexible & personalized

Employees will work from anywhere, any time and business processes are tuned and built to support flexible, time zone aligned, remote first & hybrid working culture.

Cross country markets will emerge and people across the regions will collaborate better on delivering success to their customers.

The services that are offered to employees and customers will be hyper personalized and they will be able to take their experience anywhere they go and access services with any device.

Social & collaborative

Diversity and inclusiveness will continue to be the key elements of the culture, and everyone’s opinions stay important to take the organization forward.

Employees will engage in natural and non-hierarchical communications across the organization, and they will have necessary tools and technology at the disposal that allows them to communicate the way they want and improve social collaboration.

They will continue to strengthen their ‘networked’ organization through new tools and technologies to make communications and collaboration easier.

Open & compliant

Information will remain a key enabler, however access to information will change per their compliance policies. Security, privacy and compliance will become even more important in future.

The core IT systems will be easily interoperable, and the IT assets will be easily discoverable and accessible through internal developer platform / API / core asset marketplaces.

There will be a strong access management & control mechanism in place at various levels that will guard ourselves and their key information from misuse.

Smart

Companies will integrate the physical workspaces with digital technologies to build smarter and more personalized experiences for their employees, customers, and guests and will continue to improve the experience using the big data.

Our technology will enable employees to use different devices and help experience a truly connected workspace.

They will use AI for enhancing their human effectiveness at work and provide full or assisted decision support for key organizational decisions.

Sustainable

Companies will care even more about sustainability and environment and ensure that they run on sustainable energy and prioritize being carbon neutral (if not negative). they would have committed to and demonstrated actions on supporting the SBTi goals towards climate action.

For the assets and devices owned by them, they will follow the eco-friendly recycling and promote reusability.

Their cloud infrastructure will run on green cloud computing.

Fast, yet accurate

Digitally transformed organizations are highly data driven. They have trustworthy data, made available to employees and leaders through established data platforms and relevant tools. The data that people are entitled to access is available at fingertips, in the format the employees want.

All operational, business, and organizational decisions are driven by intelligent & actionable data insights.

Innovative, learnable

The digitally transformed organizations make innovation easy and take efforts to democratize innovation within the organization. Their next phase of growth is driven by innovation. They have lower barriers for innovation and experimentation and set clear paths for idea->impactful outcomes.

These organizations retain a high focus on research and continuous learning and people capability development. Employee growth & development is a core part of the organizational strategy & culture.

Final thoughts

Markets and customer needs are evolving fast, and technology is evolving even faster. In the new age of business, there is an inherent need for companies to stay ahead of others. Being a modern & digital organization gives companies an advantage in the competitive market to respond faster to changing customer needs.

While above 8 principles define the characteristics of the modern & digital organizations from inside (for employees & its leaders), it’s very important to know that being digital and modern is no end state, but it’s a continuous evolution. The companies who would wait and stay reactive, will be in a true danger of irrelevance, unless they act now, and act fast.

Being a modern & digital organization gives companies an advantage in the race, the relentless focus on customer success, being flexible and adaptable to customer needs and being continuously innovative towards building better / newer products and services for customers is what will define the success of these organizations.