Breaking Through the Digital Ceiling

To say that COVID-19 has changed the world is an understatement. Much is still uncertain, and how we deal with the aftermath today will define what becomes the ‘normal’ of tomorrow. However, based on the swift changes in health concerns, remote working, and recession, most of us can agree on the need to accelerate digital transformation and maximize the use of technology. Now more than ever, we need digital tech to come to our aid, from building intelligent supply chains to collaboration platforms to remote learning tools. Digital technologies are defining the way we heal, study, work, learn, socialize, and plan for the future. They have the potential to make us all more resilient, regardless of what crisis or opportunity comes our way.

To better understand the resilience challenge and opportunity, my team and I conducted research with over 1,000 companies, ultimately published in our Infosys Knowledge Institute Digital Radar 2020 report. We found that despite the rapid adoption of digital initiatives, most companies hit a digital maturity ceiling — with rapidly diminishing returns despite significant incremental investment and effort. What holds these companies back, and what can executives do to reach the next level? 

The Knowledge Institute report identified five practices that leading companies use to break through this digital ceiling – and move beyond individual programs to sustainable progress and greater resilience.

Architect for evolvability. Architecture is a powerful conceptual tool to describe structures and relationships for an organization, data, applications, and infrastructure. However, architecture is typically implemented as a static model, leading to rigid processes and institutional inertia. The leading companies in our study demonstrate an experimental, evolutionary mindset to their architecture. They take a component approach to maintain flexibility. As the pandemic showed, enterprises need their architecture to be as nimble as their business needs.

Operate with accountable agility. Success leaves clues, and incumbent enterprises can look to digital disruptors to deconstruct their superior practices. We studied the operating models of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple as well as China’s Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. A common theme is that despite their scale, each of these tech titans generates power from their ability to engage in two-way conversations with users, with near-zero latency. This allows these massive enterprises to understand individual user motivations and quickly adjust their operating models to anticipate customer needs.

Value people interactions over tech transactions. A transaction is a narrowly defined task, with one user experience. Analytics and insights are then performed through a different context, and then shared through yet another set of tools. While this siloed and sequential approach functions in steady state operations, it is not sufficient for the hyper-productivity environment required today. Leaders take a 360-degree interaction-based approach, where the tasks, insights, and collaboration between stakeholders are done in the context of the same user experience, creating higher value and fewer handoffs.

Move from linearity to circularity. While employee collaboration can readily occur at the workgroup level, enterprise-scale collective consciousness requires supporting systems that are hyperaware and ensure that information is available to all who need it. Leading companies in our study regularly give employees access to company information and encourage employees to learn, and provide feedback loops to quickly incorporate and embed learnings. They develop the capability to really understand information and develop insights, then offer relevant actions and meaningful recommendations.

Build resilience through velocity and trust. For enterprises, the virtuous cycle — action positively reinforced by the result — holds the promise for companies to evolve habits and stave off irrelevance. Improving resilience is different from merely achieving uptime. To develop resilience, think of digital improvements in terms of short, focused projects instead of lengthy, broadly scoped implementations. Failures can occur, but the impact of these learning opportunities is much smaller. Trust is essential, and leading companies build trust by delivering data, experiences, and interactions in a simple, transparent, and omnipresent fashion.

Companies that break through the digital ceiling bring a different mindset: they apply technology with employees and societal stakeholders, not just shareholders and customers, in mind. In a new world of lower demand and higher volatility, this broader stakeholder capitalism outlook enables them to be more effective. When you think about it, enterprises that harness the power of advanced technologies in a more natural sense-respond-learn-evolve fashion, exhibit the characteristics of a live enterprise. Having more live enterprises that behave with intelligent empathy may be just what the world needs now, to solve the wicked problems we face today.