How to Build the Organisation of Tomorrow?

A question that I get asked a lot is how should organisations navigate today’s Digital Transformation? An interesting question that encompasses different layers. It depends on who asks the question, the company involved, the industry the company is in, the size of the company, etc. Since the arrival of information technologies, digital transformation has been on the agenda for many organisations. Most of these organisations seem to be struggling with it.

With the appearance of the first wave of ‘advanced’ IT in the 1990s, the nature of organisations changed. IT changes organisation design, intelligence, management and decision-making. With that, digitalisation often shifts the power balance within an organisation, altering existing relationships among stakeholders. As a result, information technologies tend to create flatter organisations. Bottom line, IT drastically affects organisations. So, what to do when organisations have to deal with advanced IT such as analytics or artificial intelligence?

During my PhD at the University of Technology Sydney, I have tried to answer that question. How will emerging information technologies, such as Big Data analytics, blockchain and AI, affect organisations? What should organisations do to remain competitive in the increasingly digital world we live in? My PhD is nearly finished as I submitted my dissertation a few weeks ago. Currently, I am working on transforming my dissertation into an easy to read and digest management book. It will be available in Q1 2019. In the book, I set out to develop a model for digital transformation, which I would like to share with you here.

The organisation of tomorrow will be built around data. Therefore, the first step is to datafy your organisation and collect data at every process and customer touch point. The second step in the organisation of tomorrow is to distribute that data. Either using centralised databases in the cloud or decentralised databases using distributed ledger Technology. The third step is to analyse the data. This will enable you to find patterns and make sense of it. The final step in building the organisation of tomorrow is to automate it using AI. This will enable you to leverage the data and embed smartness in every process and customer touchpoint. This leads us to the secret sauce to building the organisation of tomorrow:

Transforming your organisation into a data organisation requires above all data. To achieve that, the first step is to datafy your organisation. Datafication is the process of making a business data-driven. It involves transforming social action into quantified data. This means, collecting (new) data from various sources and processes using IoT devices or creating detailed 360-degrees customer profiles.

Datafying your organisation starts by making your office, your workplace, your processes and your products or services smart. This will make previously ‘invisible’ processes traceable, allowing you to monitor, analyse and optimise them. Thanks to the lowering costs of sensors, increasing low-cost bandwidth, cheap availability of cloud-computing and processing capacity, it has become easier and cheaper to make these processes smart. It will help you capture data consistently and universally across different processes, products and workplaces.

Of course, data quality is of utmost importance when datafying your organisation. Low-quality and biased data is useless and can even cause damage to your organisation and customers. Therefore, within tomorrow’s organisation, data governance will become very important.

Once you collect data within every process and customer touch point, it is, of course, important to store that data in order to use it. There are two ways of doing so. Ideally, the organisation of tomorrow will make use of a combination of two technologies. First of all, you can distribute the data using distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain.