Change Your Business for the Future

Business organizations cannot be passive nowadays but must continuously adjust to the fast changing technology era. Recently, I participated in a program reflecting changes in the current situation. Entitled, “Cross-Boundary Transformation,” the program encourages the self-transformation of organizations for effective work across organizational or national boundaries by using information technology as a necessary tool to drive work across boundaries.

Information technology has been playing important organizational roles for a long time now, enabling people - especially customers to access information and services everywhere and at any time more comfortably and effectively, via online networking.

However, the past use of IT was minimal, only to modify the distribution process for goods and services while not increasing organizational and worker productivity. Moreover, the benefit from applying IT in the organization has tended to decrease continuously.

The second-era trend of IT usage in operations brought increased productivity throughout operational processes, including the value chain from upstream to downstream industries, thus again increasing the productivity acceleration rate.

First-era IT usage to develop the goods and services distribution process had no effect on the roles of workers in organizational structures. But second-era IT usage must transform organizational structures and workers’ role by focusing more on global collaboration.

Collaboration is a deeper level of cooperation where one organization will work with other organizations similar to its own; sharing the same goals, having a sense of shared ownership, sharing and exchanging information, and operating together in some manner, for example, in joint product development or decision-making on some issues, etc.

Examples of “Cross-Boundary Transformation” and global collaboration:

- Hospitals in some parts of the United States have created same-standard patient databases and share these databases together, thus facilitating doctors to have more information about their patients, particularly in case of emergency and where distant treatment becomes more possible.

- Wikipedia allows online encyclopaedia users to add or edit encyclopaedic content. This method has made Wikipedia very informative and comprehensive. Moreover, all content is checked widely by users.

Besides more highly effective IT development that has lowered the cost of communication, greater numbers of leading world organizations are collaborating more closely with other organizations and stakeholders. This is because goods and services provision is more complex and there is more business competition based on more highly convergent and innovative technology so that product-life-cycles are shorter and more complicated, and the demands of customers vary. Thus, to collaborate is better than to compete.

However, the many challenges to “Cross-Boundary Transformation” that leaders of all organizations must face, such as increased human involvement and complexity, slower and more long-distance feedback, increased technical and non-technical work adaptation, and decreased formal authority structures may cause people to feel threatened in the midst of transformation that occurs slowly and continuously.

Nevertheless, organizational leaders must improve themselves and step out of their comfort zone into a new business context that is more competitive, but more collaborative at the same time. New organizational structures, new skills for workers, new models for working, new knowledge and technology is needed in order to achieve success in this changing world for the coming future.

Dr Kriengsak Chareonwongsak
Senior Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School , Harvard University
kriengsak@kriengsak.com, kriengsak.com, drdancando.com