EDITOR’ S COMMENT

Senior managers interested in maintaining positions of internal control may work against free collaboration within, elaborates Farid Al Sabbagh at Fujitsu.

First, let us dispel falsehoods. Digitalisation does not just need young people. It requires people with flexibility and a range of skills. It does not just need new technology, it requires new business models.

Organisations throughout the Middle East are finding barriers to digitalisation through deeply imbedded cultural practices. To make an organisation fully digital, there must be a willingness to develop and nurture digital corporate culture. This may be daunting, but to truly compete in modern business environment, one that favours the versatile, adaptable organisation, refining business culture can be critical for long-term future.

A system designed specifically to meet the needs of the consumer can often be undermined by a company’ s established culture. Digitalisation in the modern era repeatedly fails, due to an intrinsic inability to address cultural inefficiencies.

Digital allows employees throughout the organisation to share information easily. Horizontal and bottom-up information flows, at the expense of traditional top-down, allows expertise to move more freely and discussions are held more widely across the organisation. This can worry senior management, as people active in helping others with freedom of expression and greater connectivity can sometimes build more respect than management themselves. Fear of losing control is one of the toughest obstacles to change in the digital transformation. It is

Farid Al Sabbagh is Vice President and Managing Director, Fujitsu Middle East

certainly difficult to promote the reimagining of hierarchical structures to managers who have been reliant on them for many years, whilst encouraging the use of social platforms to share ideas.

Internal battles for influence can slow decision making, as can difficulties justifying value for the business. Again, senior managers can be reluctant to allocate resources to a process which remains difficult to quantify. In addressing digitalisation, there is still a tendency to focus too much on the technology, rather than a willingness to rethink how people work, the human centric aspect. This is crucial, as is becoming familiar with how decisions are made and implemented.

Creating an environment where individuals are free to experiment requires a visionary element. Visionaries help organisations focus on what is important in making the business function. Without flexibility and freedom to take initiative, organisations will be less likely to rethink how they work and managers will remain concerned with a loss of control. A new management attitude would coincide with a more defined career path and can help develop a skills plan.

Internal power play can put significant restraints on progress towards digitalisation. A shared sense of purpose can go a long way to alleviating work-based opposition, whilst granting a more agile decision making process. The old organisational structure, with strict hierarchy and command and control, pushes those keen to influence further to the boundaries. Distributed decision making imbedded in the structure will lessen the likelihood of resistance to reevaluate how they work.

The people least likely to interact with customers, and those who are unlikely to know exactly what the customer wants, are the ones making the vital decisions in an old business model. In this environment, high level managers will concentrate more on the actual technology, rather than discuss what it is used for and how it will help.

Digitalisation is acting as a central point to facilitate necessary movement towards new business structures. There will be obstacles. Yet it is in identifying these obstacles that an organisation will truly be able to transform and reap the benefits of the digital revolution.

12 Issue 03 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS