MSc Management Leading through Digital Disruption Assignment Sample

Introduction

Throughout the business of the organization that includes the culture of business the process of implementing the digital technology can be referred to as digital transformation. The study aims to include the analysis of the digital transformation along with the evaluation of the culture that is digital ready. The chosen organization will be Marks and Spencer, headquartered in London, UK.

Task 1: The Case for Change

Organization and explain what it does and in which markets it operates 

Marks and Spencer group PLC is a multinational retail brand from UK headquarter in London. The company specifically includes the selling of clothing products, food products and home products. In the London stock exchange the organization is also listed. The Organization was founded in the year of 1884. By the year 2019 the organization had 959 stores in UK, among which 615 stores had been selling the food products (Joshi et al. 2022). In different Nations the Organization of Marks and Spencer have over 1400 stores. The main aim and objective of the organization is to build a socially connected community thus improving the local environment.

Digital transformation of the company

Pandemic of Coved 19 had been moving the consumers rapidly towards the digital channels. In Marks and Spencer digitalization has been improving personalization. They also have been implementing digitization across their stores and shopping missions by making sure that they are at the forefront of the latest trends and innovation. In the organization M&S, the operations also had been transformed by the implementation of automation that has been increasing the efficiency of the working capital (Kamaruddin et al. 2021). The traditional retail approach of Marks and Spencer’s also includes the implementation of Omni channel consumers so that they can cope with the evolving demands of the customers.

Objectives of its digital transformation

The objectives of digital transformation are as follows:

• To reduce cost

The time consuming tasks with the help of automation can be completed much faster at a much lower cost.

• To increase revenue

The utilization of digital technology also allows organizations to serve many more customers that grows the customer base and increases their revenues.

• To increase the productivity among the employees

Digital transformation has been providing benefits to the employee performances by helping them focus on much more rewarding and valuable work.

• To increase collaboration 

The digital transformation has been creating connections between the employees that allow them to share ideas and knowledge and align their skills and efforts towards the organizational goals.

Task 2: Gaining Digital Business Agility

Digital Business Agility Model

Digital Business Agility Model (DBA) is developed as a cornerstone of competitive advantages in digital business era to ensure a transformative workforce. As stated by Xu and Koivumäki (2019), DBA model ensures capabilities for companies to respond effectively and quickly to limit business threats and seize new market opportunities. Companies in digital need agility and in order to become agile, three main components are hyperawareness, make informed decisions and execute fast. Marks and Spencer aims to transform digitally their HR strategy to impact its business agility. These components are developed and form DBA model to create a workforce agile in nature.

Figure 1: Three components of Digital Business Agility Model

(Source: Influenced by Shahiduzzaman and Kowalkiewicz, 2018)

Hyperawareness

Hyperawareness refer to ability of companies to monitor and detect business environmental changes. Hyperaware companies are attuned to incidents around them and keep changing their organisational components based on their opportunities and threats (Shahiduzzaman and Kowalkiewicz, 2018). Marks and Spencer are attuned to their external sources such as partners, customers and competitors to gain an agile internal operating environment. This company is seen to gain insights from its potential customer base and created Digital Acceleration Team (DAT) on social media to know customers’ needs and requirements. TCS became an effective partner of M&S that drives its HR transformation using Oracle HCM suite (REALTIMES, 2022).  In such a way, customer and partnership awareness of M&S helps this organisation to become highly competitive in nature in current digital business era.

Make informed decisions

Informed decision-making improves organisational decision that shapes the future of organisational in competitive marketplaces. According to Clohessy et al. (2018), information decisions influence employees and excel businesses to bring experts and diverse work culture to ensure innovation. In this context, M&S has developed inclusive decision-making that has connected intelligence of workforce to organisational goals with collaborative and integrative perspectives (Butt, 2020). HR transformation program of M&S has helped to prepare, plan and deliver employee engagement and experiences which helps to meet business objectives digitally in all their global presences.

Execute fast

Fast execution plays a vital role to transform workforce with excellence and speed. Butt (2020) mentioned that fast execution in business by developing a workforce transformation is based on organisational processes and resources. In digital agility, business requires two types of resources such as agile talent and agile technology. M&S develops their employee experience through its HR strategy. 27 million M&S employees are currently working at 1,450 locations in UK which have ensured new system integration in business innovation (REALTIMES, 2022). On other hand, organisational processes are business enablement and rapid intervention. This company is focused on needs of different customers and delivers accurate information digitally to shoppers. Their marketing process is characterised by effective research and development which has minimised impact on natural environment and developed supply chain activity in a professional manner.

Advise on digital technology and initiatives to gain digital business agility

Digital technology is an advancement of business to reach to world population by enhancing connectivity and public services in businesses. As mentioned by Gurbaxani and Dunkle (2019), digital technologies are devices that are faster, and compact in nature which has impacted significantly present internal businesses. M&S are highly recommended to incorporate digital technology to experience a versatile workforce, automation in operation, social connectivity, information storage and fast transportation. Along with this, M&S is required to take the initiative to digitally transform its business accurately and effectively in currency customer marketplaces. According to Shahiduzzaman and Kowalkiewicz (2018), a digital initiative is a plan which enables customers and businesses to undertake real-time digital transactions to ensure customer-centric business and profit development with stronger resource management. Both digital technology and initiative for M&S would ensure a strategic business plan in digital transformation as well as would enhance business perspective greatly in customer marketplaces.

Artificial technology (AI) is highly recommended to M&S to integrate their market operation successfully to gain successful market opportunities. M&S partnered with Microsoft and experienced a retail transformation including AI in 2018. M&S digital developmental team and AI engineers of Microsoft are seen to work together to make standard business operations successful to improve customer services and customer experiences. Along with this, it has gained a successful retail experience in all of its global presences due to implementation of AI solutions. As suggested by Albukhitan (2020), AI technology helps to make pricing decisions, demand forecasting and product placement accurately and make sure the connection of customers with the right product at the right place and time. AI in M&S has developed predictive analytics that helps to develop stock and stores in global presences and strategically connected business with their customers’ demand strategically.

M&S is recommended to gather customer feedback and need to refine them as needed. It can be noted that M&S needs to develop a vision and coalition to support customer needs and requirements. As mentioned by Shahiduzzaman and Kowalkiewicz (2018), a strong feedback analysis process helps a global business to make them well-aligned with the requirements of current marketplaces. Additionally, this would make sure a customer-centric workforce and would develop market data strategically for further market promotion and advertisement strategy. Albukhitan (2020) argued that digital transformation is a business journey which needs continuous checking of processes and improvement. It is highly required to develop their progress and management with a customer-centric approach. This is needed to analyse customer issues and queries on a regular basis and that requires a fast analysis approach based on the customer journey. Hence, M&S is highly required to develop their market analysis based on past customer experience and current needs while ensuring their strategic awareness based on market opportunity. After analysis of customer queries and analysis, this organisation is expected to ensure strategic development in digital transformation and would be able to manage employee insights towards a customer-centric approach. In such ways, this organisation would greatly impact customer-centric businesses with a strategic digital approach in the current digital customer market.

Task 3: Create a Digital Ready Culture

Creating a digital ready culture 

The digital culture is a significant part of the digital transformation process. As observed by Yuana et al. (2021), the digital transformation provides additional changes to the operation by creating a digital ready culture that can help them to become much more efficient in their digital capabilities. The digital ready culture will include the digital transformation within Marks and Spencers in which there will be the implementation of digital technology throughout the organisation, by including the evaluation of client engagement, marketing and e-commerce. The significant ways by which an organisation can include the digital ready culture are as follows:

Putting customers first

The digital ready culture always includes autonomy that provides freedom to the company along with its customers. The focus on digitalisation within an organisation will provide benefits to the business reaped by its customers (Imran et al. 2022). The digital assets and the strategies inside the organization of Mark and Spencer must have the ability to provide benefit to the customers. The customers must also know how the power of digitalization helps the bottom line.

Figure 2: Functional areas of digital business transformation 

(Source: As inspired by Barmuta et al. 2020)

Creating a collaborative culture

The implementation of the collaborative tools is a significant way by which digital culture can be created with collaboration. There can be collaboration across the operation inside the organization of Marks and Spencer. The face to face collaboration is also included inside the digital culture which makes sure that inside the team the digital tools are accessible equally among all the team members.

Instilling a culture of innovation

The implementation of digital technology that encourages innovation specifically includes the digital leaders to focus on the process of innovation. This further includes the increase in the revenue of the conducted business (de Araujo et al. 2021). There can be the implementation of innovation through experimentation in the organization of Marks and Spencer that can help them to fight against their rivals. They can also be the implementation of innovation that includes autonomy providing the workers inside the organization to do what is right for the customers.

Becoming a digital-champion

The initial way to become a digital Campion includes the organization to implement the strategy of digitalization throughout the business. This also includes the collaboration of the digital aims and objectives with the business strategy that helps the employees to get a clear vision of implementation of the digital technologies. As observed by Keane and Yu, (2019), another way by which a business order organization can become a digital champion is by including the customers in the first priority list. The cultivation of the mind set in which the customer centric actions will be kept throughout the business of marks and Spencer’s includes the alignment of the members of the team towards creating a value for the customers.

Task 4: Steer Collaboration

The collaboration is a part of the strategy of digitalization that can be implemented throughout the business which helps them to increase their revenue by cross selling their products to the customers that already exist. As per the authors Ahmad et al. (2021), this requires organizations to implement innovative strategies by the recombination of the technology that already exists. To enable a proper business the companies requires the chief collaboration officer. Some of the steps by which the CCO can increase evaluation within the team members in various departments within the organization are as follows:

Encouraging open communication 

There are many organizations that facilitate communication among their team members in which one of the easiest ways for increasing communication is implementing transparency. The culture of communication throughout the organization must be encouraged by the CCO within the various departments of the organization that includes the collaborative ideas of work objectives.

Creating a culture which is collaborative

Throughout the organization the CCO must help the workers who had been experiencing the overloads of their tasks. This includes the implementation of a collaborative culture that helps the members of the team to evaluate and analyze the level of work for each of the workers

Encouraging open feedback 

The encouragement of open feedback specifically includes honest collaboration. This helps the completion of the operations throughout the business organizations in a seamless manner (Anthony Jnr, 2021). The open feedback is encouraged by the CCO among the workers that helps them to put forward their feelings and opinions by further trusting the authorities.

Enabling of understanding and empathy

For knowing the workers personally the CCU must implement empathy throughout the company or organization which includes understanding the employees personally and further helping them with the help of communication.

Task 5: Develop your Leaders

Daniel Goldman’s 6 leadership style is one of the most appropriate style of leadership that can be use by the leaders for their development. The commanding leadership style is the first style of leadership in which the leader takes all the important decisions inside the workplace (Moon, 2021). The second style of leadership inside Goldman leadership style includes the visionary style of leadership in which the employees are motivated by the leader to carry the long term mission.

The third style of leadership in Goldman 6 leadership style includes the democratic leader in which the ideas provided to the team members are provided by the leaders so that they can also be an essential part of the decision making process (Karaszewski and Drewniak, 2021). The coaching leadership style is the fourth style of leadership in which the development of the interpersonal skills is included for the team members. The fifth style of leadership inside Goldman’s leadership style includes the affiliative leadership style. The leaders keep their complete focus on creating a collaborative relation with the employees inside the organization. The 6th style of leadership is the page sitting style of leadership in which the leader creates an example of performing with high quality. Among all the styles of leadership the authoritative leaders motivate the employees by keeping them forward in the Frontline (Jonathan et al. 2021). They also include the implementation of innovation.

Conclusions

Digitalization has been impacting the organizations after the pandemic. The core concepts of digitalization have been included in the current assessment which carries important strategies to have the chosen organisation for a much better performance in their business.

Self evaluation

With the help of this assignment I have been able to understand how digital business includes the digital culture in which there has been the encouragement of innovation within the organisation by implementation of digital technology. I have also understood that digital ready culture always focuses on the customers that can provide benefits to the business.

In task 2, I have written about business agility is developed based on Digital business agility model which has total of three components and has successfully gained customer-centric business approach in digital business era. Along with this, this has ensured an AL based digital technology implementation and customer feedback analysis initiatives that have successfully designed digital transformation of business with customer-centric approach.

References

Ahmad, B., Da, L., Asif, M.H., Irfan, M., Ali, S. and Akbar, M.I.U.D., (2021). Understanding the antecedents and consequences of service-sales ambidexterity: a motivation-opportunity-ability (MOA) framework. Sustainability, 13(17), p.9675.

Albukhitan, S., (2020). Developing digital transformation strategy for manufacturing. Procedia computer science, 170, pp.664-671.

Anthony Jnr, B., (2021). Distributed ledger and decentralized technology adoption for smart digital transition in collaborative enterprise. Enterprise Information Systems, pp.1-34.

Barmuta, K.A., Akhmetshin, E.M., Andryushchenko, I.Y., Tagibova, A.A., Meshkova, G.V. and Zekiy, A.O., (2020). Problems of business processes transformation in the context of building digital economy. Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues, 8(1), p.945.

Butt, J., (2020). A conceptual framework to support digital transformation in manufacturing using an integrated business process management approach. Designs, 4(3), p.17.

Clohessy, T., Acton, T. and Morgan, L., (2018). Contemporary digital business model decision making: a cloud computing supply-side perspective. International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 19(1), pp.1-20.

de Araujo, L.M., Priadana, S., Paramarta, V. and Sunarsi, D., (2021). Digital leadership in business organizations. International Journal of Educational Administration, Management, and Leadership, pp.45-56.

Gurbaxani, V. and Dunkle, D., (2019). Gearing up for successful digital transformation. MIS Quarterly Executive, 18(3).

Imran, F., Shahzad, K., Butt, A. and Kantola, J., (2021). Digital transformation of industrial organizations: toward an integrated framework. Journal of Change Management, 21(4), pp.451-479.

Jonathan, G.M., Rusu, L. and Van Grembergen, W., (2021). Business-IT Alignment and Digital Transformation: Setting A Research Agenda. In 29th International Conference on Information Systems Development. Association for Information Systems (AIS).

Joshi, N., Gabhane, D. and Somashekhar, C., (2022). How Social Media Marketing is Helping in Customer Retention and Customer Engagement: A Case of Marks and Spencer. ECS Transactions, 107(1), p.17027.

Kamaruddin, S.S., Mohammad, M.F. and Mahbub, R., (2021). The Current State of The Implementation of Mechanisation and Automation (M&A) In Industrialized Building System (IBS) Construction Industry. Research in Management of Technology and Business, 2(2), pp.699-711.

Karaszewski, R. and Drewniak, R., (2021). The Leading Traits of the Modern Corporate Leader: Comparing Survey Results from 2008 and 2018. Energies, 14(23), p.7926.

Keane, M. and Yu, H., (2019). A digital empire in the making: China’s outbound digital

Moon, J., (2021). Effect of Emotional Intelligence and Leadership Styles on Risk Intelligent Decision Making and Risk Management. Journal of Engineering, Project & Production Management, 11(1).

platforms. International Journal of Communication, 13, pp.4624-4641.

Retailtimes.co.uk (2022). Marks & Spencer digitally transforms HR strategy to enhance business agility. Available at: https://www.retailtimes.co.uk/marks-spencer-digitally-transforms-hr-strategy-to-enhance-business-agility/. [Accessed on: 9 September 2022]

Shahiduzzaman, M. and Kowalkiewicz, M., (2018). Digital organisation: A value centric model for digital transformation. In AOM Specialized Conference: Big Data and Managing in a Digital Economy (pp. 1-1).

Xu, Y. and Koivumäki, T., (2019). Digital business model effectuation: An agile approach. Computers in Human Behavior, 95, pp.307-314.

Yuana, R., Prasetio, E.A., Syarief, R., Arkeman, Y. and Suroso, A.I., (2021). System Dynamic and Simulation of Business Model Innovation in Digital Companies: An Open Innovation Approach. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 7(4), p.219.

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