Technology is only one of six dimensions

Many organizations spend heavily on technology and see their daily work barely change. The cause is usually management, not the technology. The idea of reshaping management for digital transformation says an organization has to change on several fronts at once; buying a new system covers only one of them. This article sums the idea up as six dimensions and shows how I have applied it in real projects.

Six dimensions of reshaping management

Read the drawing above from the outside in.

Dimension	Question to answer
1. Challenges from the environment	Where are customers, competitors, rules and technology heading?
2. New business model	If the change succeeds, what new value is created?
3. Digital organization design	How must structure, roles and decision-making be rearranged?
4. People and digital skills	Which skills are needed, and who must learn what?
5. Digital process	Which steps can be removed, and which must change?
6. Digital technology	Which systems, data and infrastructure are needed?

The first two dimensions push from outside: challenges keep changing, and the new business model is the goal the organization chooses. The inner four are what the organization must change itself, with organization design in the middle, keeping people, process and technology pointed the same way.

Technology is only one of the six. An organization that starts by buying technology usually changes only that one part.

Example: a factory moving from paper to a mobile app

In the factory where I work, forms used to be written by hand at the machine and then collected for someone else to type in. Seen through the six dimensions, moving to a mobile app is mostly a change in how people work, and only partly a system installation.

Dimension	What was actually done
1. Environment	Customers wanted faster, traceable production data; paper was a day late
2. New model	Decision makers see production status right away instead of waiting for a report
3. Organization design	Decide who owns each data set, and who decides from it
4. People	Technicians and QC co-design the forms; training happens on the floor, not in a classroom
5. Process	Record once at the source, remove re-keying, check values on entry
6. Technology	A mobile app that works on weak signal, APIs and a central database

I ran machines, repaired them and worked in QC and production control before I wrote code, so people and process are the dimensions I weigh most. I know which forms get filled in with dirty hands, and which steps exist only because they always have.

A second example: a small farm uses the same frame

At the Baan Rak Phak farm the organization is one person, yet the six dimensions still apply. The challenge is weather that changes faster. The new model is growing by data. Organization design means deciding what the system may decide by itself, such as stopping the pump when the internet drops, and what stays with a person. People skills mean reading charts and data, the process is a watering rule that looks at the forecast, and the technology is the boards, the edge host and the AI.

What happens when a dimension is missing

The failed digital projects I have seen tend to fail the same ways. With technology alone, you get a system nobody uses. Without process change, you get the old paper form on a screen. Without developing people, people quietly go back to paper. The fix is to plan people, process and technology together.

Recommendations

1. Start from the outer dimensions. State the challenge and the new business model clearly before choosing technology.
2. Put organization design at the centre. Name the data owners, the decision makers, and what the system may decide on its own.
3. Plan people, process and technology in one table. Every project must answer all three.
4. Invest in people as much as in systems. Train on the floor and let floor staff co-design.
5. Review the outer dimensions regularly. When the challenge changes, the plan must change too.

This article is my own summary and interpretation from practice. The drawings are new and do not reproduce figures from the reference.

References

เทพศักดิ์ บุญยรัตพันธุ์. (2022). Strategic planning for organizational digital transformation [in Thai]. In Strategic Digital Technology Management. Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University Press. ISBN 978-616-16-2818-5