Digital Transformation I: An Introduction

Q - Where would you rate your company in terms of its governance?

A - I think our leaders are pressing forward into the digital age in a notoriously conservative industry. This takes conviction in the fact that every industry will be changed by disruptive and digital innovators. It also takes conviction that we can be those innovators/disruptors.

Q - How progressive is it?

A - Very progressive. We actively look for ways to continually promote equal opportunities for all employees. Further I believe from the top down we are trying to encourage experimentation, pushing the boundaries of how the service center industry uses platforms.

Q - How does it compare to networked organizations?

A - I feel we bridge the gap as best we can between the traditional cash generating service center hierarchy and a pure "networked organization." This is mainly due to structure, our business model has many fixed costs and revolves around being able to turn our inventory at a decent margin. A pure networked organization would have no bosses and be purely democratic within its individual teams. This model either relies on start up capital and/or a very strong product. These huge pools of cash can then be used to fund the teams projects in hopes of developing another strong product. In our case we have created a roughly networked organization within a hierarchy, instead of using a venture capital situation for funding we use our budget. This allows us to concentrate on problems specific to our industry and easy access to many of the established players with which we can validate our ideas before committing significant resources to development.