Businesses need to get strategic with digital

Oh for heavens sake, can every company that talks about creating a digital strategy actually mean it?

 

In the last few months I've had a bunch of meetings and calls with business prospects who claim "we want a digital strategy" when all they really want is either:

1. A document that bolts online stuff into existing processes or technologies
2. A presentation that just scares the exec board and therefore gives certain people permission to ask for more budget or grab power

However, these aren't strategic digital aims, they are either tactical online plans to try and push digital into the current way of working or political manoeuvring to better specific careers.

 

A digital strategy is neither of these. Instead it is a plan of how your organisation is going to enable and optimise its digital ecosystem

 

Insight, the one digital metric we don’t measure

I hope that by now most large company execs by now will have heard of the existence of website analytics. Some (especially the more marketing and technology focused) may even have seen dashboard reports from their analytics suites.

These displays of graphs and numeric tables can help the senior team quickly get an idea of the value of their digital channels, with ‘Goals’ (online results such as sign-ups or purchases) and ‘CPA’ (Cost per acquisition) figures being obvious KPI’s to get regular updates on.

These hard and fast numbers can go a long way to dispelling half-truths, rumours and ‘gut feel’ that humans instinctively use when there are gaps in their knowledge.
Note: I still see and hear of execs citing ‘hits’ as a great indicator of online greatness, with no understanding of how this figure is derived nor the understanding that traffic without purpose just creates a burden on IT infrastructure more than anything else.

Receiving and reviewing these dashboards might be one way of checking the digital success of an organisation, but a few pie charts and year-on-year comparisons does not even start to show the key output that needs comes out of these figures… insight. Insight that your digital analytics team (perhaps only made up of one person or even just part of a role somewhere) should be craving to provide

Measuring facts from all your digital touch-points is now possible and relatively easy in the online world. You insert a tag or two into each page (or action) of your website and sit back and watch the numbers scroll before your very eyes. Real-time reporting is now a reality, with even the free packages such as Google Analytics telling you where, when and what your visitors are doing at every step of their connected customer journey. But gaining insight from these figures is a different matter and measuring the value of this insight is exponentially more difficult still. Perhaps that’s why to-date it isn’t measured

But actually, it is...kind of. Insight derived online reports can show up in all sorts of ways, usually when there is a feedback loop from this data back into the business, for example:

• Geographic data about where website or app visitors are coming from can inform business strategy. Imagine the mergers and acquisitions team knowing which counties the biggest increases in valuable business traffic have recently come from
• Significant differences in the search engine keywords entered by users to reach your sites can predict market or investor trends. Data that could be of potential use to many central functions, including finance, proposition and commercial teams
• Site bounce rates can not only inform your User Experience team of potential issues, but can reflect on product price, content quality or site speed (or a possible combination of all three plus other factors

It’s a shame however that this contribution to the organisation can’t be effectively measured. You can’t really put a price on the provision of internal data within a company, without coming up with some sort of mad model that will be more hypothesis than fact… the very thing thatdigital analytics tries to constantly minimise

Why I want automated check ins

My wife says she trusts me. I know this because she tells me on a regular basis. She doesn't have to tell me, but it's nice to be told anyway.

However, when I asked her recently why she trusted me, I didn't get the response I expected. Instead she said "I know where you are all the time because you check in on Foursquare". After I got over the shock of her not having unmitigated faith in my activities, I began to realise what she actually meant.

You see she has now got used to seeing my digital waypoints appear at difference intervals throughout the day. Those automated announcements of my majorships appearing on Facebook are actually mini notifications that I'm out there somewhere and activity posting my whereabouts.  Or to put it another way... she has a certain amount of reassurance from knowing I'm voluntarily checking in on one of the most popular location - based online service.

However I can see a time where I'm going to stop using Foursquare.  I'm actually tiring of it a little and am not getting the rewards from using it I want. Why? Well the gamification seems to be getting poorer (for example I don't seem to get many badges for constantly visiting places) and I have such a geographical spread of friends that I'm getting notifications from as far afield as London, Sau Paulo and Somerset.

But if Foursquare automated their service, I would still keep using it. In fact, I'd turn it on, leave it on and have it poll my location on a regular basis. I'd still use it's user generated comments feature to find out useful stuff and still check to see who else is nearby. But importantly Mrs S would get more regular reassurances that I'm alive and on the go.

Or to put it more bluntly.... if I turned automatic notifications off, I could understand why she mighy trust a little less.

Is there a future for tablet computing?

I got asked yesterday what I thought about the statement made by Thorsten Heins ,the Blackberry CEO, that tablets are not a good business model. Mr Heins claimed that there will be no need for tablets  in five years and consequently the news sources have said he’s either a complete loony or a wise technological sage. “So is he completely barking?” I got asked by this friend…. Well yes and no.

As you may have read in an earlier blog, one of my future predictions is that technology will become more complex and yet more usable (complex in the number and types of devices and systems, usable in their interfaces), with the speed of change only increasing too. This speed of digital transformation should manifest itself in the ability of technology suppliers to design, build and launch devices much quicker… meaning they are both more responsive to customer demands and able to plug identified gaps in their products portfolios.  In effect… this all means that we should get more devices, more quickly and doing more things in more ways (that’s a lot of ‘mores’!).
 

So what does this mean for the tablet, a market sector that has only really existed in its current form for only 3 or so year? Well in my opinion it means the complete fragmentation of the tablet market into a range of smaller, bigger, wider, slimmer devices that more closely fit the task(s) required of them.  The computing market has been in a state of flux for some while, with different machines rising and fading in popularity as processors, displays and batteries all increased in specification and capacity.  So will the Tablet continue to exist? Yes, in the short and medium-term. But in the longer terms...  the tablet as we know will it evolve and diversify until the word means as little as “personal computer” does these days.

Note: I was wrong about the take-up and scale of the iPad market when it launched. I could therefore well be wrong now...

In the future this will all be...

Ever wondered what is going to happen in the next few years or beyond that? Well, with my digital crystal ball I’ve come up with a thought or two on where things are headed.

1. The future is going to contain more technology.
It’s going to be faster in its processing (and therefore seemingly more ‘clever’), more usable and even more ubiquitous than it currently is. However (because of this and other factors) it is also going to be more complicated and connected, meaning that even the word we live in now will seem like a pre-industrial medieval state in just a decade or two.
From clothing embedded with NFC chips costing only a few pence that tell you they’ve been at the bottom of the washing basket for over a week, all the way through to comparison websites that automatically compare the information from that telematics insurance box now built into your hybrid electric car.

2. Data is going to be the most valuable currency
We already know that the huge valuations of online services such as Google and Facebook are not just because they have great functionality (such as to link us to our friends & old colleagues) or a great way of finding stuff…  but because they collect, use and continue to build up data on individuals and their habits, preferences, friends and what they had for breakfast. Amplify this fact by an increased population which is online more often via more devices, collecting even more data and you really start to understand how (after water and  perhaps actual currency) data is going to be the most valuable commodity there is.
I’m not suggesting you will always be able to pay for a bottle of water in a street café by giving them your date of birth… but is it that hard to imagine a time when you will be able to use your Starbucks loyalty card to get a free bottle of water in return for signing-up for their new improved reward programme, which just needs to know one piece of information…. Your birthday??

Learning the art of learning

I have learnt a lot more in the last 15 to 20 years than I ever intended. It wasn't intentional... the aim was that I left school and university (actually, it was a Polytechnic until the last year I was there) then went & got a job.

I thought I was done with learning. I'd never really enjoyed studying whilst in the education system. I'd coasted through on the minimum of effort, didn't try to learn any more than I needed to and got distracted by cars, girls, TV & computer games along the way.

But something has happened since then:

1. I now enjoy learning

2. I've learned to learn

3. I now learn so I can can tell others

Nobody told me how to learn, instead I had to work hard at it. This meant spending a lot of time reading, re-reading and focusing on truly understanding a subject.. enough to be confident that I could put it into my own words for others to comprehend it too. However, it has now got to the point that when I'm half-way through browsing through an article or online blog posting I suddenly think "oh, that makes sense... I need to blog about that".

Perhaps now I understand the Oscar Wilde phrase:

"It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it"

Organisational eBusiness Maturity

Thankfully, a growing number of organisations are looking to improve their digital channels. Consequently they are looking around for others who have already made a step forward and to learn from their innovations (without hopefully copying their mistakes).  Consequently I have seen certain trends appear over the years that may act as a model of not only where companies have come from, but also where they can grow and develop in the future.

Note: Like most of my work on this blog, this model is a ‘work in progress’ where I post my thoughts before they are completely refined and documented. It is therefore submitted with the aim that it will not only be refined by my own further understanding and application, but by wider feedback (either via comments on this blog or by other means).

 

Here’s how I see the organisational maturity of a company progressing (typically in the retail, financial services and travel markets, but potentially in others where this model can be applied):

Individual
Online initiatives originally sprung up thanks to the innovation and inspiration of specific people. Historically this may well have been a young-ish or passionate person who saw the opportunity to utilise some form of digital technology to improve something or interest to them.  Based in the IT, Marketing or other part of the company, they would initially have had very little influence, but potentially the opportunity to create and learn by themselves.

Department
As the individual has grown in their knowledge, they may well have caught the eye of senior individuals. Aligned with a growing understanding of the possible benefits of digital channels for communication, acquisition, commerce and engagement…  this one-man initiative may have grown into a team of people who have specialist knowledge of digital (marketing, eCommerce, User Experience, Analytics, etc.). From experience this has usually been the ‘land grab’ stage, with different high-powered players staking their claim to know all about modern technologies and taking this department under their wing.

Enterprise
Eventually the rest of the company wakes up and realises it is not just the digital team that either needs to understand and use digital tech, but that the whole organisation has become an e-ebusiness, with a digital eco-system around it… enabling everything from new customer influence and marketing through to existing customer self-service and HR connectivity (e.g. automatic postings to job sites, etc.)

Extended
For a company to truly ‘live’ digital however, it needs to move beyond the connected state (e.g. creating a bunch of fixed  digital connections with its customers and suppliers) it needs to extend some of its functions outside the organisation and embrace co-creation as a way to generate a flow of sustainable new ideas and talent.  API’s and XML interfaces enable these companies to allow 3^rd parties (individual developers, agencies and sometimes even entire industries) to build upon their data and functionality, to reach a new audience or to connect to other web services in ‘mash-ups’. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t easy stuff and very few companies have the will, ability and braveness to venture into this territory. But for those who do (e.g. Amazon, Google, etc.) the rewards are obvious.