What Digital Venture Building means for MENA businesses
Going fast to reduce risk sounds counter intuitive. But speed is just table stakes when it comes to digital transformation.
In the digital economy, customer demand is the main driver of growth. In order to keep up, most firms are investing in building more digital products and services, and they’re using better software and more efficient software engineering practices to get there faster.
Software isn’t just an afterthought or a set of tools running quietly in the background anymore, it is becoming the central product or service, at least this is what customers expect.
You can see some of this in action already where firms reposition themselves to explicitly state they use tech or tech related products:
Eg “On-Demand Healthcare” or, “AI-enabled Insurance”
The use of software in business and digital technology in general has been more about doing the same things we’ve always done but doing it better, cheaper, faster. Relatively few companies are going back to the basics and saying, given these capabilities, what business are we really in? How could we do business fundamentally differently?
Typically each wave of new technology is adopted by frontrunners to gain a competitive advantage, however the landscape in MENA hasn’t been competitive as other territories due to market size and regulatory differences. This means overall investment in people and platforms has been low.
Today, the market is much more open to foreign entrants with a greater level of digital maturity. Many long time local firms are responding to this by investing in more digital channels to increase sales and marketing activities but haven’t yet extended that digital investment across the entire organization to unleash growth.
WHAT ARE THE OBSTACLES TO GROWTH?
- Legacy IT systems that aren’t suitable for today’s mobile experience economy
- Lack of regional tech talent to build internal teams fast enough
- Digital disruption from startups
- Lack of velocity
The faster you can get products into the hands of customers, the quicker you can start making revenue.
One main obstacle to achieving velocity is organizational bureaucracy. It’s hard enough to go faster with existing business as usual, let alone introduce an entirely new way of working which is more collaborative and agile.
Digital Venture Building allows companies to take advantage of a highly qualified team of strategists, engineers, designers and architects to execute digital projects at speed; from cloud migration to creating new on demand business units, to connecting your product to the Internet of Things.
Digital Venture Building reduces the risk of traditional IT investments and removes the uncertainty associated with a shift from long executional cycles to iterative, continuous development.
Alpha Apps has been a trusted Digital Venture Partner for businesses in the Middle East for almost a decade.
We work with consultants and clients directly, to execute their digital transformation strategies, build MVPs and launch new digital revenue streams.
Learn more about how we’re helping to build the businesses of tomorrow, today!
