New realities of digital ecosystems

“Everything in motion”

Driving performance and effectiveness has many entry points in today’s business. Shifting economic performance and regulatory standards, the behavior and crowd patterns of consumers and providers shaping market forces is shortening the duration of strategic window of opportunity.

With technology enabling so many points of contact and digital content its little wonder that “everything is in motion” from searching and sourcing your own operational needs to defining, making and delivering the products and services.

A new kind of strategic planning and operational implementation is needed for the future that recognize these realities. Enterprise presence and interactions is through physical and virtual networks and markets that existing in a modern global and local economy. This profoundly changes that strategic skills and planning necessary in all areas of the business and market relationship.

Ecosystems Perspective

I see this as an “ecosystem” perspective that transcends specific viewpoints into an integrated approach that must take shape and root in the fabric of the organization, its people and cultural approach. The future of key business processes and services are “entangled” in scope and dependency that can traverse homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. The themes on interdependence could include:

• Structure

• How the actual organization and its operations are positioned in a physical and virtual sense in the markets, its products and services and underlying infrastructure. How this is affected through digital infrastructure and technology to best service the enterprise.

• Process

• The governance, policies and standards in place to manage activities and the different types of transition paths possible for different speeds and rates of change.

• Outcomes

• Measures and goals set and their alignment towards specific growth, cost and performance relating expectations of stakeholders and investors of the organisation.

• Creativity

• The different uses of benchmarking and innovative thought leadership to challenge and push through and connect current competencies to future needs.

You can develop singular approaches to restructuring, governance management or innovation of change, yet because of the connected enterprise through technology these need to consider the big picture and its dependencies on operational performance and readiness.

Towards a ecosystem architectural perspective

I see a number of complementary systems and approaches to thinking required to develop this further.

Digital Ecosystem Strategy

The development of a comprehensive digital strategy that connects the business, technology and services of the organization and its operating model. Categorize and drive a business plan and operational process for tier 1 applications, social business, mobility and platforms for your organization.

Ecosystem Services Strategy.

The assessment and design of sourcing and demand for shifting the enterprise to an on-demand operating model. We examine different business and IT “as a service” options and fit for the organization and the potential digital strategy and operating model changes, risks and benefits from the perspective of digital infrastructure and application services and the business perspectives of operations, processes, staff skills and disciplines

Workspaces and organizations.

The design of organizational and workspace boundaries and collaboration platforms using technology for productivity, collaboration, innovation and social business insight. Establishing transition and transformational practices for organizational performance improvement through effective knowledge management and technology design.

Information & Semantic Management Strategy.

How to define your big data, master data and information management strategy for security, performance and usability. Establish semantic policies and standards to industry semantic standards and new information models to manage your storage, BYOD, multi-channel collaboration and usage.

Practitioner roles and skills excellence

I see a key barrier to much of this is training and expertize development necessary for practitioners to understand and work in designing and delivering viable and sustainable enterprise and wider social and business ecosystems. In particular CxO expertize to manage modular and scalable devices and platforms that are representative of these new realities. Much of the soft skills will need to avoid reverting to old school management thinking and lack of standards in econometric, behavioral science and technical expertize to overcome challenges in building commercially competitive digital operating models and services. These new realities include an appreciation of modularity, copresence and a deeper integration of metrics and automation into solutions.

Technological ecosystems in practice.

New viewpoints of technologically enabled ecosystems need to evolve. I will develop this thinking more in a webinar in January 2014 and how different digital ecosystems models need to be considered and the role of data and big data in particular within this. https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/9059/95571

Ecosystem Visualizations

A topic for a future blog is to explore the context and meaning of ecosystems and in particular how these are visualized to support experiential evaluation and representation. Model notations, semiotics and visual design methods to express and design ecosystems.

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