Successful companies look at the move to digital holistically, as part of their business strategy led from the top of the organization rather than a simple IT effort just “bolting on” additional technology to call it done.
Digital needs to be at the core of a company’s business strategy. It’s not sufficient anymore for technology or IT to be aligned with the business, it must be at the foundation of the business, converged with the business. Companies that are successful at digital have a holistic strategy for a complete digital transformation for the organization.
A digital business works differently and builds value differently than the traditional approach to commerce. If Amazon had started with a traditional mindset with incremental change, they wouldn’t have become the $100B powerhouse they are today. An effective digital strategy seeks to achieve cross-functional agility, speed, and innovation across the enterprise. Many organizations are not ready to address this challenge.
The CEO should drive the enterprise-wide digital vision and strategy. Forrester (Infosys, September 2015) reported that the 69% of businesses where the CEO is responsible for the digital strategy invest more than 10% of revenues in digital initiatives. They also have dedicated resources to digital strategy, governance, and execution. How much money, resources, and effort is your company investing in digital?
A Complete Digital Strategy and Roadmap
A unified digital strategy must align all the executives and the business goals and include:
- Specific digital vision, goals, and objectives, including new Service Level Agreements (SLA’s), key metrics, and business case for action.
- A review of industry forces, conditions, and competitive profiles.
- Digital disruption opportunities using technology to threaten traditional approaches and challenging boundaries between industries and supply chains.
- Opportunities to change how the company engages with all stakeholders, including customers, partners, employees, and other stakeholders.
- Opportunities to become a customer-centric organization; improving and reinventing the customer experience, having a customer-centric focus in every part of the business, addressing customer interactions and community, and addressing rising customer expectations and delighting the customer.
- Innovation to improve products and services through digitation, accelerated time-to-market, improve differentiation and strategic agility in the market.
- Opportunities to improve operational efficiencies, simplify business processes, reduce expenses and improve financial performance.
- Strategies to increase influence and brand reach in the market.
- Opportunities for big data & analytics to provide customer insights, behavior analysis, segmentation and targeted marketing.
- Specific digital technologies such as mobile, other connected devices, and social media.
- Use of new delivery platforms and options such as cloud computing and new requirements on the technical infrastructure.
- An integrated data model.
- Organizational impact, including 24 x 7 support, call center needs, and new skill set requirements.
- Opportunities to make the most of a company’s technology and business strengths.
- Budget impact and requirements.
- Digital governance and execution monitoring for a multi-year roadmap with prioritized initiatives and resilient execution.
