With the Paris' Enterprise Digital SUMMIT 2017 just three weeks ago we are already in full swing for the London edition in November. With a great line-up of UK and European case studies we will continue the discussions on how to succeed with the digital workplace transformation. But before we look at the upcoming event we want to have look back, and share with you our take-aways of this year's Enterprise Digital SUMMIT in Paris. This year's Paris edition was led once more by the question regarding the "next wave of digital disruption" for the workplace and how to succeed within the contradicting areas of ideas for a digital company model and the existing reality of organizations. As said before - the technological evolutions are outpacing the cultural and organizational changes. The VUCA world is already requesting for changes, but the "next wave" of technological enhancements like AI, Machine Learning, Conversational UX and Blockchain Technology making changes inevitable. (As this recap became too long for just one post - we had to split it up into three parts! This is part 1 of a series of 3 posts!)

Digital Operating Models Imply New Organizational Principles

At the Paris event we had quite a number of expert talks exploring the characteristics and building blocks for the operational models of the digital age. The beginning was made by Emmanuel Jusserand, Digital Strategy Lead France and Benelux at Accenture Strategy. Emmanuel gave an introduction to Accenture's idea of the digital operating models. Accenture is seeing five key strategic dimensions that operating models of the future should be orientated at. Each model dimension (Customer-Centric/Extra Frugal/Data-Powered/Skynet/Open & Liquid) has its specific challenges and implications for the operating model. Companies need to be clear about their visions on which dimension is strategically important for them and then they should align their operating models with the requirements of these dimensions:

Accenture's key digital operating models and their implications

In the second expert Shriram Natarajan (Persistent) emphasized that companies need to leverage the data capital. With that he highlighted the "data-powered" model of the Accenture conceptualization and outlined that "data" is the key to all the other models. Furthermore "leverating the data capital" implies a good interoperability within the company and its processes. In the end the driveness by data implies that the companies need to become "software-driven". From a technical point of view Shriram defined four building blocks that organizations need to take into account

Building Blocks for Leveraging the Data Capital (by Shriram Natarajan / Persistent)

As a third expert speaker Dinis Guarda gave an introduction into the world of blockchain developments and its implications for the organizations. In many ways the blockchain technology will disrupt all centralized coordination systems - and replace them with distributed, but fully encrypted peer-to-peer networks. The financial systems are the first sector being transformed by this.  But as Don Tapscott has written in an HBR article:

Today, collaboration tools are changing the nature of knowledge work and management inside organizations.  But there are clear limitations to today’s suites of tools, as we still need central intermediaries to establish trust and coordinate much of the capability. This creates an opportunity for blockchain-based systems.

Last but not least we heard Christine Overby from Post*Shift giving us some ideas on the implications for establishing a "service-orientated architecture for the organisation":

Rough outline of an org model with a service-orientated archtecture (by Christine Overby / Post*Shift)

One key success factor for the journey of the digital transformation that Christine mentioned was the distributed change approach where "sensors are to be established to measure the progress and feedback of change", agile methods are used to "move and fail fast" in change efforts - and do it better in a new iteration. In many ways Christine recommended to not apply the change management efforts in a top-down manner of traditional management. This was also a key recommendation of the shared lessons learned from the practice talks at Enterprise Digital SUMMIT from Accor to Sanofi as well as Vinci to AirLiquide that we will cover in our second post of this series. See also the review of Sylvain Diouloufet of Lecko: Analytics: a powerful tool for Change agents to measure their impact on the organisation (1/2)

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Stay tuned for the next publications in this series - read in the next parts of this post the following:

• Digital Transformation: No Guts, No Glory
• Digital Workplace as Change Platform for the Transformation Journey

Get your Special Summer Ticket for the Enterprise Digital SUMMIT / London on November 16!