Friday, March 22, 2013

Are you optimising your Digital ecosystem?

Digital technologies are not just for online marketing purposes or for providing your customers with the ability to conduct online transactions. They are there to enable the entire organisation to benefit from: better communications, faster supply chains, improved staff training, assessment & retention and help improve a number of other line-of-business tasks that either make money or save time.

In short, your entire business ecosystem should be complimented by online technologies and processes. This then creates a new type of organisation, one that fully utilises a digital ecosystem.

So what does this digital ecosystem look like? Well this depends on your business and the way it operates. However, there are a few common themes that are pretty generic to any organisation, usually based around typical business lines and support functions. 

Here I've recreated an old diagram I used to have, that gives a representation of a business and the different key departments within it. I've then indicated the main functions (of the left side) where online can then help and enhance the ecosystem.

The aim is therefore for any digital strategy to integrate into these key areas and optimise the business processes, data flows or customer engagement in whatever way possible.


Hopefully I will have time to improve on this diagram in future postings...

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