Making Digital Delicious

Today some organizations have a sour taste in their mouth on digital and for good reason. There are those large consultancy firms that make one feel that they hold the recipes for digital and if you are willing to part with millions, they can make you a master chef. Your IT department, backed by deep research from high priced research firms, can also create and appetite and provide some teasing tasting plates of various digital technologies to choose from for the future. These approaches have created a bad taste in many organizations mouths. We would suggest that your organization is already digital and could be more digital with some practical steps unless your industry is under duress to create a new business model. Here are three practical approaches to create the “Digital Donuts” (Figure 1):

                                                        Figure 1 Digital Donuts

Create a Better Customer Experience:

Today the customer experience is crucial for customer loyalty and attracting new customers. This doesn’t mean that your business model is broken, however it means your organization should make it easier to do businesses with now and in the future. There are a number of efforts that can supercharge the customer experience. Of course making things mobile, aggregating data from legacy systems and eliminating unnecessary keying through automation are no brainer efforts. Mapping and measuring customer journeys are a next step to remove friction in the processes and point out opportunities for more automation, chat bots and digital assistants. If your organization is bogged down with legacy overburden, significant wrapping may be required to create processes and customer journeys

Pick a Business Optimization Opportunity:

While business optimization has been an ongoing drive for most organizations, these efforts can be supercharged by process mining leveraging time lines, predictive analytics, machine learning, and various forms of process automation. There is also a new emphasis on resource optimization and assistance through knowledge assistance for human and software bots. More straight through processing and assisted exceptions are growing in popularity which requires a more precise closed loop approach to decision management assisted by no code decision approaches.

Pick a Business Differentiation Approach:

In parallel to investments in the customer experience and optimizations, organizations can sandbox new business approaches by trying new processes in a fail-safe environment. When time to market makes a difference, buying additional companies that represent a great jump start to a new business model is typical for digitally savvy organizations. 

Net; Net:

Don’t let others make your organization feel digitally unsavory. There are many great digital recipes. Your organization is probably digital already, but now is the time to make choices to become more digital leveraging the best business direction possible. Since digital allows for better outcomes in a speedy and agile fashion, some directions can be corrected in flight with today’s digital approaches leveraging decision management, more automation and no/low code approaches.  Many of these flexible digital technologies are embedded in Digital Business Platforms (DBPs)

Additional Reading:

Digital Disappointment

Productive Digital Mini Journeys

Successful Digital On-Ramps

Digital Business Platforms (DBP)