Exploiting Digital Innovations in the Digital Era

The rise of new technologies and globalisation have resulted many organisations to experience changes and these changes are vital to keep the businesses running. Organisations need to transform towards agility and digital business supported by digital innovation culture. This is strategically important in today’s digital era because every aspect of a business from operations to management is run using digital tools. Adopting Digital Enterprise Architecture (EA) as an organisational culture will support new business models in the digital era in two ways: (1) it will align the organsation’s business and IT capabilities with the goal of identifying ways to optimise performance and, (2) it will move an organisation from its current state to a desired future state. This will lead organisations to capture new growth opportunities in the new age.

In order to derive value from the growing opportunities of digitalisation, organisations need to recognise how their businesses can benefit from it, as well as develop capabilities to implement these recognised possibilities. In other words, organisations need to find ways to exploit digital innovation. In the current digital era, digitalisation is blurring all industry boundaries and consequently opening up the full exploitation opportunities of digital innovations.  It is necessary to develop strategies and capabilities that are flexible and adaptable.

Shaping Digital Enterprise with Digital Capabilities

Figure 1: Digital Related Capabilities toward Digital Innovation

Digital related capabilities such as human, collaboration and innovation capabilities are able to help organisations to respond quickly to digital transformation and to exploit digital innovations as shown in Figure 1. One of the key important aspect of digital related capabilities is the human capabilities. As the source of digital innovation, digitalisation requires employee support, talent readiness, and digital know-how. Organisations that lack digitally skilled employees or staff skilled at digital talents will suffer from deficient capabilities because of the high complexity demand in the current digital era.

Disruptive digital business that emerges from digitalisation, requires innovation capabilities to be managed successfully. The capability to innovate, identify, and exploit business opportunities, as well as to diversify the business area, are among the innovation skills needed to address disruptive digital business. In addition, the ability to develop new ideas, solutions, and innovative offerings are among the most important capabilities for any organisations to possess in the current digital era.

Organisations often require development of new capabilities that can respond to new situations and dynamic changes in order to better equip themselves. By unleashing the said digital capabilities, it increases the odds of survival in the current competitive environment.