Organizational Effectiveness goes Digital - PwC

The traditional approach to organizational effectiveness is reliable, repeatable, and results oriented — but requires a large amount of time spent examining one specific moment in the business life cycle. Think of it as a photograph that takes months to develop; eventually, the picture is clear, but the moment in question has passed. And while numbers are crunched, the rest of the organization carries on as usual, displaying the same habits and patterns leaders are hoping to correct.

Put simply, modern enterprises need a modern process — one that leverages technological capabilities and provides leaders with a more agile way to get a holistic view of their company. In this tech-empowered vision of organizational effectiveness, artificial intelligence and machine learning could become as commonplace as the spreadsheet.

The foundation of this digital approach to organizational effectiveness borrows from an existing design practice known as the Digital Twin. A Digital Twin is a virtual model of the asset, which allows designers and manufacturers to apply different inputs, measurements, or stressors and examine the response, all without the time, expense, and risk of building or testing a physical asset. Using a Digital Twin shortens the product development cycle and time-to-market, and drastically reduces capital and operating expenses.

Today, any enterprise can experiment in real time, without worrying about irrevocable real-world consequences. And companies can arrive at the resulting insights more quickly, with a better picture of how each part of the business impacts the whole. Essentially, it enables experimentation not possible through using traditional methods — stakeholders can enact change in a live simulation and see the results of applying different strategies before making decisions with far-reaching consequences.

The Digital Twin approach draws on human knowledge from years of on-the-ground experience; however, this global expertise can now be accelerated with algorithms and pattern recognition, which are rendered even more powerful by increased speed and processing capability.

When companies assess the current state of their organization, they typically focus on four key areas, or lenses, that provide them with a view into how the work is getting done: organization, culture and behavior, workforce, and costs. The idea behind a technology-enabled assessment of organizational health is the ability to manipulate all of these lenses in real time.

Whereas in the past, company leaders may have focused on one or two in isolation, now they can view these four lenses quickly and comprehensively, and use what they’ve learned to test hypotheses and gather data in multiple areas so they can see what might happen in different scenarios.

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