A simple and practical Digital Strategy

Digital has evolved from ‘online’ enablement to today's broad and highly complex landscape impacting most areas of business and society. Its no longer a “nice to have” but is now critical to survival. Quite simply we can’t run our businesses and societies without Digital.
Digital adoption is difficult. When you scale beyond initial pilots, and individual solutions quickly you encounter fundamental challenges requiring considerable effort to overcome before you can continue to get value. Taking the next steps requires “buy in” across an organisation and complex co-ordination often across many different initiatives.
While some Digital challenges remain technical and skills related, the most often quoted inhibitor to Digital Transformation is the inability of an organisations culture to accept change (Google “ Digital Transformation challenges” and you will see consistently over the last 3 years the same list).
Some of this is the expected reluctance to adopt change, but increasingly the challenge to overcome is more fundamental due to the significant shifts in how an organisation operates as Digital is introduced (and often further inhibited due to mis-information, such as “automation will take your jobs”).
Addressing this needs clear communication about what Digital Transformation really is and how it connects and shapes organisations goals. Problem is though, Digital Transformation has become very difficult to describe as it now covers everything from customer contact, to AI and IOT adoption — and just about everything in between !.
So what is Digital Transformation now ? how can you explain it ? and how should you structure it ?
Most of today’s published analysis, and online dialogue describes Digital Transformation as three interlocking components : (1) Customer First focus, (2) Adopting Innovation and Optimisation solutions, and (3) Enabling agility with a Connected Platform to support the activities of the first two. The diagram at the top of this article shows how these three components interact. This is described well in the case study around BBVA’s Digital Transformation (BBVA Case Study).
This framework helps to connect many of the separate components of a Digital Transformation, while keeping the core components obvious. By crafting a simple Digital Strategy around this framework, it can then easily be communicated and used for decision making and direction.
Customer First
Digital starts with taking a customer centric point of view for everything an organisation wants to do. Everyone needs to be thinking about how their experience effects the customer experience, and how digital solutions can improve these interactions. At the heart of this is the question of “How do I better help different customers obtain and use the products and services they want and need ?”.
A considerable part of the effort here is about improving the interaction with clients by adopting multi-channel access (primarily mobile), improved customer ‘journeys’ (e.g. simplifying interaction and making it more relevant), through to gaining and acting on a deep understanding of customer needs (marketing analytics).
A good example of adopting a Customer First digital approach is here Sunrise Communication Customer First case study (from Adobe), and another example demonstrating how deeper customer insight leads to improve revenue (this one from Google) Wyndham Holiday Rentals customer insight case study.
And finally an article which talks about the impact of IOT on the Automotive Insurance sector, and how gaining more information can be used to improve services and change customer behavior (lowering cost to the customer) Impact of IOT on customer engagement in automotive insurance
Innovation and Optimisation
Inside an organisation the impact of Digital reaches across all areas and processes. The ability to make better decisions due to better education, data, tools and techniques enables work to be done differently. Legacy processes can be automated allowing focus to shift to more valuable work (Customer Focus). Analytics can be used to predict failure allowing it to be remedied before the event, rather than respond to a failure and all the costs that incurs. Robotic’s is becoming much cheaper and more intelligent, allowing much broader scale deployment (McDonalds run by robots).
Many of these initiates require a different approach breaking from legacy, one which is more open to external influences and ready to experiment. Agile and “Design Thinking” are examples of responses to these challenges. This Fast Company article explains the “Design Thinking” approach Fast Company Design Thinking. The approach is to iteratively experiment, improving and proving each time to get to an optimum solution (or disqualifying the idea if it can’t be proved).
The race to adopt such Digital technologies is critical to survival for many organisations. This is not just about reducing cost by removing people, but is about focusing on where an organisation can create most value to survive and thrive. This brief blog note summaries exceptionally well some of the challenges and possible responses INSEAD Liri Andersson Blog post
Connected Platform
A Connected Platform is the set of solutions (technology, processes, alliances and skilled people) which enables and supports Digital transformation. This is the architecture of the Digital transformation and ranges from the provision of core infrastructure (which will usually be Cloud based services), Data management, API management, Analytics, through to business process re-engineering and support for organisational change.
The goal of the Connected Platform is to enable Digital solutions to be built, tested and deployed rapidly. Continually bringing in new thinking and adopting best practice to optimise and improve. The connected Platform needs to (1) Be assured, stable and secure; (2) Enable rapid deployment; (3) Be functionally rich.
I particularly like the UK Goverment’s approach as described here UK Gov. Digital Service Design Principals.
Digital Strategy
At the intersection of these is the Digital Strategy which describes what the organisation wants to achieve, who it wants to achieve this for and how it wants to achieve it. Digital Strategy is closely aligned with the core strategy of the organisation (and in many cases is the same).
In practical terms, three key considerations for Digital Strategy are (1) How to keep Digital adoption relevant and compliant; (2) How to keep agile; (3) How to co-ordinate across the different initiatives for maximum customer benefit.
PWC has published a very broad apprasail of Digital and its implications for developing a Digital Strategy which can be found here PWC Digital Megatrend. Mckinsey also has some good recommendations and points of view Mckinsey CEO’s guide to reinvention.
Most organisations establish some form of Digital Steering group to provide overall governance, lead by a senior Digital Leader (this is a Board level appointment) accountable for driving Digital adoption
In this article, EY describes some of the challenges governance has to address for a regulatory and controls point of view EY Digital Governance. The ISACA has also published a presentation which covers in practical terms of lot of what you should do for Digital Governance ISACA Digital Governance Recommendations
Hope this helps with efforts to communicate what Digital Transformation is today, I’ve used the three circle framework a number of times and it does seem to enable better understanding and discussion of how Digital spans across so many interlocking areas.
Originally published on https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/simple-practical-digital-strategy-vincent-powell
