The internet is constantly evolving and businesses need to keep up. Find out how a successful digital strategy can provide powerful business benefits and customer value, and what an expert consultancy can do to help you develop, implement, and grow your strategy.
Every organisation needs a strategy for how to best use digital technology to drive better outcomes.
What is a digital strategy?
Digital strategy is focused on how technology can improve business performance. Sometimes that means creating new products, and other times that might mean reimagining a current process. It focuses on the direction an organisation will take with technology, as well as the tactics it will use to get there. This usually includes changes to a company's business model, as new tech makes it possible for innovative organisations to provide services that were previously impossible.
The world has changed and so has how we embrace technology as a company. With digital technology becoming more integrated into the world and businesses, it's no longer about hardware or software.
Your digital strategy should align with your business objectives in order to meet the needs of your users and customers. A good way to stay focused on this is the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework. This enables you to think about what customers want to achieve, and how technology can help them better achieve it. It frees your strategy from how things are currently done, and focuses on achieving a state that is ideal for the future.
1. Forging a digital vision with success in mind
Your digital vision is the keystone of your strategy. It describes who you want to be and where you're headed over time. Your vision should have a clear picture of the end goal: what your business will look like when it's fully evolved and thriving with technology, who will use it, and how customers will engage with it. It also needs to address how your teams work across departments, and how this all ties together as a cohesive strategy.
2. Fine-tuning your digital implementation plan
With a clear vision and plan in place, you can have a digital strategy that fits your company's needs. A pragmatic and achievable implementation plan highlights the steps your team will be taking to achieve your shared goals. This includes things like overall scope and budgets, channels, assets, platforms, and tools.
3. Mapping out your digital solution architecture
Business architecture provides a multidimensional, holistic view of the following: your capabilities, end-to-end value delivery, information and organisation; and how these views are related to strategies, products, policies and initiatives. By understanding how the different views affect each other, you can see why business architecture delivers value as an effective communication and analytical framework for translating strategy into actionable initiatives.
This framework enhances the enterprise's capacity to enact transformative change, navigate complexity, reduce risk, make better decisions, align diverse stakeholders to a shared vision of the future and leverage technology more effectively. Therefore business architecture should be put in place as a founding pillar in digital transformation journeys. It also needs to be part of all activities focused on creating and sustaining a developed digital business model.
4. Focus on delivering measurable results
In order to understand how well you're performing, you need measurable metrics that serve as benchmarks. You should use key performance indicators (KPIs) or objectives and key results, ROI and financial benefit of digital initiatives on your bottom line to prove the success of your strategy. With the right data and reporting, you can demonstrate how your strategy creates a positive impact.
5. Modernise your legacy technologies
In digital strategy, an important issue is how to modernise. One way you can do this is by making the most of your legacy technology. Your digital strategy should also help you drive improvement with digital transformation projects and across the wider business. That way, it'll focus properly on what's important to you and your company.
6. Aligning stakeholders
Our digital strategy consultancy will help you agree on your digital strategy with stakeholders across your organisation. This may include C-suite executives, departmental leaders, team managers and the wider workforce.
A small-scale digital project is likely to impact a handful of stakeholders, but an enterprise-wide digital strategy will have significant implications across the company. A specialised consultancy agency will help align your stakeholders and make sure that they become motivated supporters of this process rather than negative figures who block your progress. You'll need to involve multiple departments at your company, so gaining stakeholder confidence and commitment is essential if you want your strategy to be successful.
7. Understanding the needs of customers and users
In order to have a successful digital strategy, it's important to make sure you are fulfilling customers' needs. For a B2B organisation, this could mean providing digital tools for external customers. But internal customers should also be considered - the employees who use the digital workplace tools and processes that your organisation provides.
As a business, understanding the customers and users that matter to you can be difficult. A digital strategy consulting firm will help you build a clear picture of these needs by conducting quantitative and qualitative research and performing user interviews and surveys.
8. Considering the trade-offs of build or buy.
When it comes to your digital strategy, there are two options for implementation. Buying off-the-shelf software from a vendor or building your own system from the ground up. Our team can evaluate and recommend which solution is best for you; whether you should build or buy.
When it comes to selecting a content management system for your website, you might like the idea of using an existing product because it may come with vendor support and is quick to implement. Inversely, if you use an off-the-shelf solution, you'll have little or no scope in customising it to suit your specific needs.
Building your own solution has the advantage of being tailored to your unique requirements. This reduces the cost of ongoing licensing. But, you may need to spend more time and money in order to develop and maintain this in-house.
An expert consultancy can advise on all aspects of your core technology. They'll take a discovery-based approach, analysing all aspects of your technology needs and helping you to make an informed decision on the right course of action for each component or product. Selecting the appropriate vendors for a given component also requires significant expertise and experience in comparative modelling, architecting software and hardware, evaluating digital application security, or being pragmatic when negotiating with end-user clients.
Uniquely, they are able to combine aspects of each model to create a data-driven approach that is both intelligent and effective.
To summarise, working with a company like Elsewhen will help you turn your priorities and goals into tangible actions. Our consultancy can create an action-oriented business case that aligns with customer needs and pressing business objectives. You can rely on our expertise to help you visualise your digital future.
