By building a clear digital strategy, organizations can bring order to the chaos of prioritizing and managing the many tasks that teams will undertake to drive real organizational change.
The process of initiating change through digital efforts at the enterprise level is no overnight phenomenon. The idea that a company, especially one rooted in tradition and history, needs to overhaul its approach to adapt to a 21st century unkind to digital laggards is not always an easy process to get off the ground. To make matters more challenging, these efforts can be slowed by unforeseen or external complications. In a digital world of unknowns, it is the process of building clear, well-understood prioritization effort to tackle these transformational efforts is essential.
To get there, companies driving towards or investing in digital innovation initiatives must focus on specific tasks if they want their efforts to have impact. From securing their roadmap, to ensuring flexibility during a drastic organizational change, the biggest and most pressing issue in ensuring the success of a digital transformation is simply knowing what to do, and when.
The first and most important piece needed to drive a digitally transformative change in your organization is hiring the right leader to champion charge. The challenge here, clearly, is finding a leader with the skill set required to be both creative and analytical. Respondents to a recent IIC Partners study found the most-preferred backgrounds in a Chief Digital Officer included extensive experience in technology (45% cited) or marketing (43%). This digital native would push to establish a company vision around the Business’s digital technologies, build traction within the organizational leaders and stakeholders around current and future needs, and prioritize efforts based on impact around financial, operational, and product level requirements.
Digital leadership should also provide a holistic view of the digital threats and opportunities facing all aspects of the Business, as well as be able to deliver a method for linking these factors to a digital roadmap that can predict how changes will affect the overall vision and direction of the business.
By building a clear digital strategy, organizations can bring order to the chaos of prioritizing and managing the many tasks that teams will undertake to drive real organizational change.
Buzzword ideas and marquee-worthy improvements seemed to be at the forefront of digital roadmaps in 2016, with mobile websites (84%), social media (78%) and big data (71%) being noted as “very important aspects of digital transformation,” according to executives around the world. Despite giving off a tech vibe, these figures represent a somewhat static mentality of prioritization for digital strategy roadmaps.
