The Advantages of Digital Business Strategies

By John Chan

Digital technologies are now significantly affecting the global marketplace. A recent Forrester survey found that 89% of business executives surveyed foresee that digital technologies will have a tremendous impact on their business within the near future. Digital technologies have already had a huge effect on some industries as illustrated by the examples of Blockbuster Video and Borders Books which were companies that were unable to compete in the new digital marketplace.  At present, only one out of four companies surveyed by Forrester have a comprehensive digital business strategy in place. In this blog post, I will discuss the essential advantages for a robust digital business strategy for your organization.

The Forrester survey found that many organizational managers lack the insight to create a comprehensive visualization for a robust digital strategy and the aptitudes to deliver this strategy for their organization. Furthermore, many organizations’ operating models were currently hindering progress in creating a robust digital strategy. Often, organizational inertia and functional barriers are the main impediments for an organization towards fulfilling the goals of its digital strategy plans. Organizational arrangements, and processes that have worked for an organization so well in the past are now often hinderances for staff in adapting the use of digital technologies.

To succeed at a Digital Technology initiative, your organization’s entire business strategies must be digitalized. The organization in essence must become a digital business. In addition, the organization must comprehend their clients’ value systems for digitalizing their staff’s skill sets and arranging for these skill sets to fulfill their client’s needs. Current products and services offered by the organization may need to be altered or even eliminated to meet the demands of the changing marketplace.

In the future market arena, organizational management will need to visualize their organization as part of their client’s value systems and not just as an external party selling their products/services to their client. With this visualization, the organization can:

• Augment the importance of the organization to each client via the improvements from digitalizing the services provided to each client. With an awareness of each client’s significant needs, management can modify and improve the ways that their organization provides worth to their clients, thereby increasing organizational profits. Management should thus focus at how their digital capabilities can lead to the results that their clients desire.
• Reach for the results that their clients desire via partnerships. Organizational management can look for possible partnerships with other organizations as another resource to fulfill their clients’ current and potential needs.
• Utilize data analytics to assist their clients towards attaining their desired results. Organizational management can mine the data collected from all of their clients, along with any external data to achieve potential insights that will benefit each of their clients.

In my next blog post, I will discuss how organizations can design their customer experiences to deliver value to their customers.

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  John Chan is the ISM Software Lab Director, is responsible for software testing and defining the evaluation criteria for The Guide to Mobile and Social CRM and the CRM software offered on ISM’s Reviews Online service.