7 Essential Steps to Develop a Digital Roadmap: Understand and Apply Digital Strategy
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Organizations across industries are experiencing significant changes to their core identity, offerings, and customer experience due to the rapid evolution of technology.?
With digitalization, companies have the potential to create new revenue streams and improve business operations while avoiding obsolescence, as demonstrated by the examples of Blockbuster, Polaroid, and Blackberry.?
While each company's digital needs will vary, it’s essential for all organizations to develop a digital strategy that evaluates the impact of digital technologies on their business, determines which digital tools to invest in, and identifies how to apply these applications to drive growth.
What Is a Digital Strategy?
A digital strategy is a high-level plan that implements new digital initiatives and technologies to achieve more efficient business processes. A digital strategy roadmap helps companies digitally innovate and unlock new opportunities to create competitive advantages, grow revenue, and create value.?
Successfully creating an innovative digital strategy helps organizations meet ever-changing customer needs, expand their footprint globally, and build a “business moat” that creates a differentiator between them and their competitors.
Digital Strategy vs. Digital Transformation: What’s the Difference?
Digital transformation and digital strategy are similar terms and intrinsically connected. While similar, they each focus on different areas of an organizational digitization strategy.
Digital transformation is a more people-centric term that drives change implementation and digital adoption across the entire organization. It focuses more on cultural changes and impacts business processes, operational models, and customer experience. Digital transformation is the actualization of a digital strategy.
A digital strategy focuses on the technology that creates new business models that are more automated, efficient, and streamlined to become a fully digitally-integrated business. It comes before digital transformation and creates a technology roadmap that aligns with overall business goals and objectives.
5 Benefits of a Digital Strategy
As we’ve mentioned, having a focused digital strategy helps companies identify digitalization and guides them on how to apply them to their current business models and offerings.?
Here are a few of the most beneficial advantages of creating a digital strategy for your enterprise:?
1. Diversifies your business offerings
New technology helps companies create new business offerings that can drive entire new streams of revenue. This is why businesses need to select a digitally-aware internal leader who will create a digital strategy team to investigate both current business pain points and threats, as well as new emerging technologies.?
Examples of companies diversifying their business streams by implementing a new digital strategy include:
2. Meets evolving customer expectations
Customer expectations move as quickly as new technology emerges. COVID-19 radically impacted the needs of customers in the past three years. A digital strategy will help you identify these new customer expectations early in their development and build a plan to tackle them head-on with next-gen experiences.
Examples of companies meeting new customer expectations include:
3. Creates a differentiator between you and your competitors
For many companies, the best-case scenario for digitalization is creating a new service or experience that is intrinsically tied to the business. This is the hardest benefit to conceptualize, as it is innovative at its core – think Ziplock launching “vacuum-sealed.” Over time, competitors will attempt to replicate the concept.
Examples of this include:
4. Streamlines your internal processes
Not all digital strategies need to be massive in scope or sexy in appeal. Smaller internal process digital efforts can be equally as effective. This is why it’s crucial for digital strategy leaders to first understand a company’s current pain points to create a plan to address these issues.
Examples of this include:
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5. Protects your business from threats
Similar to the diversification of business offerings and meeting evolving customer expectations is the idea of implementing a digital strategy to protect your organization from culture shifts and digital threats – and maybe the most important of all benefits on this list.?
Here, companies research and build a digital strategy to evolve with technology (think Blockbuster failing to shift to video streaming the way Netflix has.) Investing in new digital strategies empowers companies to identify these threats from afar – and prepare for them accordingly.
Examples of this include:
How to Create a Digital Strategy Roadmap
The path to building a digital strategy is complex, but the following steps will empower you with a general framework for finding digital success:
1. Choose a leader to own your digital strategy
Your digital strategy needs a foundation, and that will be the vision of your digital strategy leader.?
Choose a leader within your organization that understands the nuances of your offerings and the vision for your company’s future, understands the social dynamics of your culture, and that keeps a pulse on cutting-edge technologies.?
This person could be given the title of CDO (Chief Digital Officer) or maybe a special liaison to your CTO or CEO. Regardless, having one strong company leader will centralize and mobile your digitalization efforts.
2. Assess how digitization currently affects your business
Your digital strategy research should start by understanding the impact technology has on your business and industry. Group your digital strategy into two categories: attack and defend.
The attack will consist of digital strategies that put your company on the offensive. This could be a new offering, a new way of driving revenue or implementing new innovative technology. Defend will consist of ways to mitigate digitalization threats and help use digital transformation tools to protect your business.
3. Explore the technology landscape
New tech has already infused itself with enterprise applications in the corporate world.?
AI, big data, the blockchain, NLP, driverless cars, mobile experiences, etc.—there are literally thousands of enterprise software providers. Your digital leaders must investigate and research the technology landscape to understand the breadth of how a digital strategy could impact your business, and then shortlist certain tech and tech vendors that could be a wise investment.?
Continue reading about how to create a solid digital strategy here.?
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CXO Relationship Manager
1 年thank u so much for sharing
Realtor Associate @ Next Trend Realty LLC | HAR REALTOR, IRS Tax Preparer
1 年Thanks for sharing.