Navigating Digital Demands: Touchpoints for Value and Enhancing Digital Maturity

Introduction

As technology, markets, and consumer demands evolve, leaders find ourselves revisiting our strategies more frequently. The call to reinvent our businesses, our customer experiences, and our cost structures has never been more continuous. With competitors emerging at varying scales and customers demanding more for less, the question is no longer if we should change, but what choices we will make to do so. These choices continually focus on digital and technology as the imperative to evolve, or risk being left behind. Despite the widespread focus on digital initiatives, we repeatedly hear about companies unable to realise their expected impact. Well-known challenges include resistance to change within the organization, complex technology delivery issues, and cultural barriers. My own experience has provided insight into the challenges of functional silos, incomplete data, and narrow delivery focusses. In addition to these roadblocks, digital is a realm of shiny objects, which serve across a continuum from distraction to costly time and money sink. In my roles at Naqel and SPL, I've been rethinking how we can break down these barriers, encourage momentum and mostly importantly, stay on track to deliver on our strategy. I’ve been focusing on touchpoints to keep a capability-based approach in mind, built on aligning our operating model—how we create value—with our strategy. This alignment is crucial for making smart digital choices that go beyond just technology.

?A Framework for Assessing Choices

?There are many pressures to adopt technologies or pursue the next digital initiative, however to make these meaningful I am focusing on three critical question, we can come back to along the way, to stay on track:

• Can we clearly define the connection between our value drivers and this initiative?
• How does this initiative enhance our digital maturity?
• Does the organization understand how this will help them achieve their goals?

These questions are simple and intuitive, yet powerful in ensuring that each initiative aligns with our strategic goals.

?Question 1: Can we clearly define the connection between our value drivers and this initiative: The value connected to a digital initiative is not merely a cost or revenue measurement or a change in some KPI. It is a function of:

• Performance: Delivering a solution that meets stakeholders’ expectations.
• Return: Both the quantitative and qualitative returns on the organisation’s investment.
• Alignment: How the investment supports the strategic choices we’ve made.

By assessing value in this way, we have a clear focus on building capability, ensuring what we are building is valuable, and that this value is delivering on the choices of where to play and how to win, that we have made.? So, we achieve alignment by delivering the right thing, for the right results, in the right way to enable our strategy.

Question 2: How does this initiative enhance digital maturity:

This second question is built on the realisation when it comes to digital, it is not enough to think in additive ways (silos or individual projects). To maximize benefits, we need to think about multiples. That is why I want to know how an initiative is not only aligned to deliver a particular product or outcome, but that it is lifting our digital maturity. Lifting our maturity is about magnifying the value of our assets, generating insight into our business, and unlocking new streams of value, through:

• Interaction: How an initiative changes the way our customers, employees, or partners interact with us.
• Data: Generating, surfacing, or mobilising data from which we can derive actionable insights.
• Integration: Enhancing connectivity between our systems, teams, customers, and partners.
• Scalability: Delivering capacity to scale.

?By focussing on more than just the direct outcome of an initiative, and connecting it to digital maturity dimensions, we are not only ensuring we are delivering additional capability, but that we are also better organising our capabilities as a whole, for example by generating insight or enhancing integration, and creating the foundations to deliver more capability in the future, by, for example creating the right capacity to scale.

?Question Three: ?Does the organisation understand how this will help them achieve their goals The final question focuses on creating buy-in and ownership, ensuring we translate across teams to find common ground, overcoming risk aversion, and inertia in pursuit of strategic investments that add clear value. This question is built on the, now common, adage that “Digital Transformation Is Not A Technology Problem”. This is true, but more than this, it points to the fact that technology only provides the possibility to deliver, and that real capabilities are built from the aligning their intended purpose, the necessary insights, an integrated set of processes, the right talent and governance, and the technology. So, by asking if the organisation understands how deploying a technology or delivering a digital initiative will help them achieve their goals, we are doing the work to create both the conditions and components to realise this alignment by bringing the people together who represent each of these dimensions.

?Conclusion At both SPL and Naqel the playing fields of our markets are undergoing real shifts driven by changing customer expectations, aggressive competition and new types of co-opetition. These changes are magnified by the broader digital transformation that affects all of us. However, when it comes to making choices about how we respond to and participate in these changes we are focussed on value. So, in a world of useful but often shiny objects such as blockchain, cloud, IOT, AI, and robotics, among others, these three questions are helping us think about how we create value, and how we build, organise and deploy the right capabilities to deliver and realise this value.

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