2016 Digital Business Priorities

A new year is an opportunity to set priorities and focus resources in ways to create desirable outcomes. In 2016 businesses will continue to focus on better customer interactions as the first major step in being a significant digital organization. In tandem, organizations will be focusing on making their operations better as we enter the second phase of digital transformation. The third phase of digital will be about changing business models which may or may not occur in 2016 depending on the number of upstart business models emerging in their industry usually driven by threats.

Enhancing Customer Interactions:

A large number of organizations have taken customer interaction and relationship management beyond just collecting simple customer relationship management (CRM) data and creating a mobile experience. Now the serious work around customer journey mapping, process visibility, customer customization and a better experience that knows the customer in the context of what they are trying to do commences. This means that putting a pretty face on traditional business transactions is not the way forward, but maybe only a first step in this emerging journey that might end up in an advanced visual interactions.

Leveraging Operational Capabilities:

There will be a premium on ever improving business operations by leveraging existing existing organizational capabilities or building new capabilities. The digital organization will be marked by ten key actions:

Encourage Keen Collaboration
Enhance the Business Experience for All Constituents
Innovate Through Experimentation
Intelligently Measure, Analyze and Predict
Nurture a Variable Speed Organization
Intelligently Leverage Resources to the Max
Build the Agility for Business Change
Grow Knowledge Augmentation Methods
Mitigate Risk with Policy and Constraints
Govern with Optimum Visibility

Changing Business Models:

Organizations may find out during the digital journey that they create capabilities that could spin off new products or services. This may eventually change the business model or not, but through incremental digital transformation new opportunities to raise revenue will emerge. For those industry segments that have upstarts, the gradual transformation may take an acceleration at some point. Business model change could become critical in some instances.

Net; Net:

Setting digital priorities for 2016 will be a major challenge for organizations while they plan their normal priorities. These three areas of priority have been consistently mentioned in research, books and by clients I talk too. You might also want to read my digital predictions and my predictions on work