Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation by George Westerman & Didier Bonnet & Andrew McAfee

Author:George Westerman & Didier Bonnet & Andrew McAfee
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781625272478
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2014-09-22T14:00:00+00:00

Making Digital Governance Work

When designing governance for your digital activities, focus on how you will achieve two key goals:

Coordination: Prioritizing, synchronizing, and aligning initiatives across the enterprise

Sharing: Using common capabilities and resources (including people, technology, and data) across the enterprise

In many big companies, coordination and sharing tend to be unnatural acts. To a manager in a business unit or region, coordination means endless meetings and unwanted restrictions. Building on shared resources can make you dependent on the goodwill and delivery capability of people you do not control. It’s no wonder that organizational antibodies rise up to defeat new corporate-level governance activities whenever possible.

Yet, the biggest benefits of digital transformation come exactly from engaging in unnatural cross-silo acts of coordination and sharing. According to a senior executive in an international banking group, “Digital impacts firms globally, across traditional silos. It requires more coordination when [we are] making decisions and conducting actions, compared to the way we do business usually. Questions are not local but global, and so the choices we make engage the company as a whole, in all countries and business units.”

This is why executives at Nike created a strong digital unit to work across the firm’s major business units. It’s why Nestlé built its digital acceleration team. And it’s why you need some mechanisms to ensure the same benefits. Governance makes up for issues that arise from the way your company is structured. It encourages employees to follow certain practices that they wouldn’t do if left to their own devices.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.