Decision Making and Change – Drivers for digitization
To understand more about decision making and change one should understand what factors drive businesses. Utility sector is driven by infrastructure, reach, technological advancements, market expectations, policies and many more. Similarly for a technological product company the business heavily relies on the strength of a technology or the product mix, customers, market competition, and others. We can list other sectors and factors driving businesses and key drivers of change, but for business to be successful and adaptive we need a power system and a control system as ERIK BRYNJOLFSSON quotes “to change the world, we need to do two things”. (Brynjolfsson, 2015)
Just as for humans, we can lift weights, move things around we need some system to control our actions, similarly for any business we need these two things. This day and age of technological advancements, we need to be understand on how we can churn the most out of them, similarly there is a need to change on how the processes are designed within organizations, or the product offering and advancement. There is vast set of automation available right from manufacturing industries to service industries we need to figure which suits the best for reaching the desired output.
Though this digital age has offered new horizons for many businesses, it still is imperative that they break this shackle of working in a traditional way and implement and unleash this power of digital.
These key drivers can be within an organizations process, product or their talent and with right balancing between the power and the control system every minor aspect of any businesses can be changed.
Digitization can play an important role in Processes, Product as well as Organizational Design. Traditionally impetus was on hiring great minds to drive product innovation and processes evolved around them, but with digitization, the shift now-a-days is towards balancing machines with great minds. With this shift there is also a sense of anxiety if machines are completely going to replace humans.
Traditional Decision Making
Recently we worked with a customer which had partnerships with some key players for over 7 years. As this was a close knit relationship the management team had developed, there were no efforts to look beyond these partners. Although research indicated otherwise these relationships were always overlooked. This was a classic example of HIPPO based decision making. There was feedback from the team and product division regarding this fading partnership but it always took a back seat.
HIPPO – Highest paid persons opinion is a term used in business and prevails almost everywhere. It is an interesting concept in this space of decision making and change, where intuition based decision making trumps analytics.
Change the way
There is a need to change and strategize the way businesses perform daily. It can be a small change in the way they hire or minor modifications in the product. Tweaking the processes or investing in automation, there is always some room to improve. Small change can lead to cascading effect, but to apply and implement these changes there should be a shift in way the management takes decision. Not always digitization substitutes humans over machines, but a collaborative effort could do wonders. Simple examples like introduction of remote control, or use of robotics on an assembly line, digital banking or online shopping are all great enhancers to the respective businesses.
– Parag Joshi
