The Importance of Strategic Orientation in Digital Transformation

Everywhere digital technology touched it simplified, uncluttered, and brought costs down dramatically. Think about how digital technology simplified your life, whether it’s commuting, communicating, or operating a remote control. Think of how much your living space was decluttered from physical items that are now digital. And, finally, think of the cost of running a global campaign, marketing or political, pre social media. Today, it takes a hashtag to start or join a global conversation, a possibility not envisioned ever before.

What is Strategic Orientation?

“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.”
—Muhammad Ali

At the individual level, your orientation sets the direction of the flow of energy in your life. Your strategic orientation has to do with “who” you are rather than specific business or career goals you might have.

My first job in my 20s, I remember I was in an ambitious mood driving home after a long night at work. I’ve just gotten a raise earlier that month and I was feeling really good about my life. I was privately telling myself that, “I am going to keep making more money, and for as long as I work harder and harder, I will get more raises. And that will be my path to success.”

I learned very quickly that working harder and harder produced fatigue and would rarely lead to generous futures full of prosperity and autonomy in life. Because of that 20-some, young-adult orientation, a great opportunity could have stared me in the face, and I would have missed it. My orientation confined what I saw and what I listened for.

But most consequentially to higher aspirations in life, everything I envisioned, everything I planned, everything I decided, and everything I acted on was along that orientation. I could neither listen for nor see anything else.

In my 30s, my strategic orientation went into a new flow: to be my own boss, to figure things out on my own, to start my own company. Not that there is no hard work in that, there is hard work in achieving anything important in life. And here is where I learned another important lesson: that the human mind is a dangerous thing to develop on your own, and that I had to stop listening to myself in many areas of life. No more of that lone ranger stuff. If you are a decision-maker, you cannot afford to do that, you have to rely on others. You have to hang out around good, superior thinkers and helpers.

In my 40s, I have my own company now, moving along another strategic orientation, you know, the usual script of a seven-year plan, a big bang exit and an early retirement.” Well. It did not happen that way at all. But something very different happened here: I became conscious of my strategic orientation—before, it was running my life without me being aware of it.

I am in my late 50s now as I share this with you. My strategic orientation is of a different nature: career is no longer a private conversation, but now a public conversation about the needs and concerns of the people and businesses I serve. My flow of energy now is directed strictly at listening and reading the marketplace as an exchange between me and my environment.

A Time for Reflection and Contemplation

I know, the marketplace is moving too fast for anyone to have time for reflection and contemplation. But pause for a moment and reflect on your strategic orientation in your career.

What is the flow of your energy? What does it look like?

Now, if you are a technology executive with the responsibility of making decisions that will impact others in your company, your customers, and your enterprise value, ask yourself:

What great opportunities could be in front of you that you are missing? You could be missing them because your orientation necessarily confines what your see and what you listen for.

The same questions go for the leadership of a business.

A strategic orientation of a business is tied to its identity in the marketplace. The identity of a business constitutes its possible strategic orientations, which like an individual's orientation in life, could change with time and maturity. Historically, it is not uncommon for mature, steady-state businesses to re-evaluate their vision at some point. A new vision implies a new strategic orientation, and our rapidly transforming digital world now seems to demand vision reevaluation.

Is your strategic orientation having you fail to see the right kind and caliber of help you might need to remain competitive in the marketplace?

Is your strategic orientation blinding you to the larger realm of concern for human behavior and business needs?

Is your strategic orientation the outcome of popular, recycled business scripts for success?

In a somewhat stable marketplace, you want to rely on the recycled success script. However, in today's highly turbulent marketpalce, you want to abandan that in favor of a new vision and a new strategic orientation based on new technology affordances, aiming at the whatever new value system is emerging.

What is different today in the new value system of the digital economy is that, whether you are a young entrepreneur with a startup, or the business leader of an established company, digital transformation means the same to both, fundamentally. While the obvious targets for existing businesses are simplifying operations and uncluttering the IT portfolio by offload the cost of in-house IT to cloud computing and web services, finding worthy meanings in digital transformation is about vision.

In the words of one of my favorite philosophers, “an authentic vision is its own measure, it does not have to justify itself as compared with anything else.” Your new vision is the place you start from. Then you aim with a new strategic orientation. Only then you are prepared to execute by exploiting digital technology affordances in the marketplace.

Ernest Stambouly is a technology executive bearing on 34 years of experience in enterprise computing, he practices as a Digital Business Coach and Enterprise Computing constultant. He is the author of Surviving Digital Transformation and Ethos of Change, and advisor for modern IT portfolio management at Achillis Inc.

Publisher: Ernest Stambouly's Blog - Wednesday, July 27, 2022

The Role of Visioning in Digital Transformation

Traditionally, the systems and application development community has approached building information technology from systems thinking, not from the conversational structures of the targeted profession—be it accounting, architecture, or healthcare. This is an inverted approach to developing software technology because information systems are not a determinant, but a tool for conducting the network of conversations and interactions that occur in a profession more efficiently, at lower cost, or in a transformative way.

The industry response to that inverted approach was a humanist movement that proposes a human-centered orientation to design. The pitfall of many methods we analyzed in this trend was that practitioners brought their technical mindset and systems-centered thinking with them to do the human-centered thing.

In our work serving digital transformation in large initiatives for enterprise business applications, as well as digital engineering, we found it more to the point to focus on a profession-centered orientation to design. But in order to avoid the aforementioned pitfall, we had to figure out what had to change, first, to avoid being blinded to the larger realm of concern for human behavior in the workplace.

We had to set course, from the start, with a new approach that focused on understanding the fundamental tensions that underlie a profession’s competitive landscape. And most of all, the client had locate their offerings in that landscape to rapidly produce a highly competitive technology portfolio in a desperately competitive marketplace.

“Although it is often helpful to use methods for evaluating and choosing amongst alternatives, these methods are harmful when they blind us to a larger realm of concern for human behavior.”

— Flores and Winograd, Understanding Computers and Cognition

Invest in Visioning to Get Started

Locating yourself in a profession’s landscape begins with visioning, is followed with strategic re-orientation, and then sets out to build a profession-centered model for their business technology. The last step, implementation, or migration of legacy computing requires that technology decision-makers exploit the plethora of web services and platforms being offered at many levels of the enterprise computing stack nowadays. The strategic objective? Join the digital ecosystem to enjoy a negligible cost of implementation and ownership.

Competitiveness in the digital economy requires not only the reduction in the cost of developing and owning technology solutions, but also making your products and services available globally. This blog is focused on the first practice: visioning, which is a business practice focused on exploring possibilities. Other installments will address the other two.

Visioning is not dreaming up stuff. Visioning is making new interpretations of situations from a reframed worldview, with focus on finer-grained services to supplant the previous generation of computing infrastructure. The absence of that focus is what we call “disharmony” in visioning, a phenomenon that many business leaders bump against as they are confronted with the changing competitive landscape and the prospect of digital transformation. Disharmony in visioning is when the approach taken is at variance with the new value system of the digital economy.

The Difficulty Grasping Visioning

Visioning grounds your business intuition and maps it to the real business and professional concerns you have set out to address.

Visioning is practice that helps you articulate a vision so that others can see what you see. You cannot create that which you don’t have clear language for.

Because visioning is about possibilities, not opportunities (not yet), it is a practice of observing, listening, and receiving as an exchange between you and your potentiality. It includes looking at technology affordances (what the marketplace offers) and applying them to the fundamental tensions of the profession.

Visioning is neither something you get to, like a goal, by applying some stepwise process, nor a systematic procedure that will get you to a specific “solution.” Visioning consists of developing business narratives for “harmonizing” your assets, which broadly means bringing the required elements together to make something new that is coherent and complete appear to you. This aspect of visioning is crucial to grasp for technology decision-makers.

Visioning is an experience, a phenomenon that becomes present to you once you get it, just like getting your balance for the first time on a bicycle. A vision eventually emerges but only from the authentic pursuit of a vision in its pure sense: a vision is its own measure; it does not have to justify itself as compared with anything else.

Strategic Re-Orientation for Setting a Competitive Course in the Digital Economy

Once the visioning practice is concluded, the next step for business technology executives is to reset their strategic orientation. This happens before strategic plans, roadmaps, and implementations. My next blog will cover strategic orientation.

Ernest Stambouly is a technology executive bearing on 34 years of experience in enterprise computing, he practices as a Digital Business Coach and Enterprise Computing constultant. He is the author of Surviving Digital Transformation and Ethos of Change, and advisor for modern IT portfolio management at Achillis Inc.

Publisher: Ernest Stambouly's Blog - Thursday, June 2, 2022