Becoming a Digital Enterprise
Just like the assembly line became the pinnacle of the the Industrial Revolution so too will the Digital Enterprise become the pinnacle of the Internet Age. Every company, large and small, to some degree or another, will have to become a digital enterprise to survive, and have the potential to thrive.
What is a Digital Enterprise?
A digital enterprise is a company that:
- Takes advantage of new digital technologies throughout all 4 layers of its organization
- Is real-time integrated across and within the 4 layers
- Uses real-time processes and automation throughout the organization
- Leverages Business Intelligence (BI), Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence(AI) to enhance decision making
While Digital Transformation is the process in which a company works toward becoming a Digital Enterprise, there is a clear set of evolutionary, value-driving, steps an organization can take to get there. Moreover, organizations can use this framework to determine where they are on the path toward becoming a Digital Enterprise.
Stage 1 — Capabilities: Your organization is focused on building internal teams and bringing on great talent whose skill sets are complementary to the digital enterprise.
Organizations at Stage 1 are typically focused on having solid digital leadership, combined with disciplines including: Digital Strategy, Creative, User Experience, Front-End Development (web and mobile dev), Full Stack Application Development, Quality Assurance, DevOps & Infrastructure. While large companies tend to build teams for each discipline, retaining top-talent and innovative minds in the long-term can often be a challenge. Smaller organizations tend to partner to find these capabilities. Organizations intend to use these capabilities to help drive the digital transformation; nonetheless, most fail. These organizations tend to forget the massive Change Management, Culture, and Organizational Inertia that exists, and most often lack the skills to inculcate the above mentioned disciplines into the core of the organization.
Stage 2 — Project Solutions: Your organization is focused on leveraging Capabilities (see Stage 1) to deliver on specific projects / initiatives. Initiatives often include branding, Website and mobile app design and development, leveraging sales force tools, etc..
However, most of these initiatives tend to be isolated projects, often delivered within a department, that do not connect to other organizational initiatives and other departments. Projects are popular as they have firm start and end dates, and they demonstrate progress and organizational activity. Nonetheless, organizational activity is not a measure of whether your project is actually contributing to an overall business objective (see Stage 3) or helping the organization move toward becoming a digital enterprise.
Stage 3 — Business Solutions: Your organization is focused on leveraging Project Solutions (see Stage 2) to achieve real-world business objectives. It is our point-of-view that there are only 5 types of business objectives, and each one requires a unique approach:
1) Growth: An organization needs to grow the value it derives from its existing customer base.
2) Acquisition: An organization needs to acquire new customers (the right type of customers).
3) Retention: An organization needs to retain, build loyalty and drive advocacy from its current customer base.
4) Cost Control: An organization needs to do things better, smarter, faster, and way more efficiently.
5) Employee / Channel Enablement: An organization needs to improve the way its employees work, with the goal of making all your employees as good as your best employees.
For each of these Business Solutions there are many different ways to achieve the goals, but the goals do remain the primary focus for organizations at this stage.
Stage 4 — The Digital Enterprise: Your organization is focused on leveraging Business Solutions (see Stage 3) to optimize the entire organization to be smarter, faster, more adaptive, and far more efficient.
Organizations at this stage are focused on integrating and leveraging intelligence from all the Stage 3 activities. They are focused on integrating across all 4-layers of an organization in an End-to-End Transformation. They bring everything together into one coherent, smart organization.
While every company need not become a full Digital Enterprise immediately, we definitely see that it’s clear that we’re coming soon to a day when it will be necessary for survival. The faster you do it, the more disruptive your company can be in the marketplace, the faster, nimbler, smarter your organization will be, and you have a far better chance of winning, not just competing with everyone else.
About the Author:
Please do not hesitate to contact me at Lawrence.Tepperman@gmail.com or on LinkedIn
Lawrence Tepperman is a serial entrepreneur, having successfully grew and exited two startups, 80/20 Solutions and K2 Digital, and is now Proprietor & President of Berkeley Payment Solutions Inc.