Behave, Deliver and Grow Like A Digital Company

Delivering digital interfaces to your organisation's customers, partners and employees is no longer optional. It is now essential for long-term effectiveness (and survival).

But this means unlocking the data, systems and functionality your business operates with and exposing this both internally and externally to meet increasingly shifting needs. But it is not easy... hardly any sizeable company has an entirely blank slate to work from. Legacy applications, processes and thinking tie any business down so that it can work well. But it is these very constraints that often limit speed and agility, which are needed to succeed now.

Digitally enabling your business means changing the way you behave, deliver and grow.

Behaviour:
Being customer focused means creating a better customer experience that can win and maintain custom in the competitive digital landscape. It also means understating and controlling your data, so you to make informed decisions quickly based on what you are observing or being told.

Delivery:
Start by using new platforms, tools and methods to build products quickly, plus then to evolve them rapidly over time. If you think your quarterly website functionality is fast now, consider that over 7 years ago Amazon stated it makes changes to production every 11.6 seconds (it may even be faster now) and Facebook releases to production twice a day.

Growth:
Don't be afraid to unleash the creativity and innovation within your boundaries to help you build. Employees must be part of the Digital journey (not observers) and everyone, not just your test manager, must work towards the continuous improvement of products and services.

How can companies stay ahead in the 21st Century?

Business life is hard right now and even the large corporates are having to examine everything they do to stat ahead. Here’s some of my high-level thoughts on the trends andapproaches that are shaping the modern digital workplace and therefore how competitive edge can still be maintained:

1. Digital DNA

Online is not a 'bolt on' to the customer's life, it is howthey live their life now; digital has become part of the customer DNA. Theyadopt, use and integrate technology all the time, to either save time or wastetime. Businesses therefore need to put themselves in the mind of thedigitally-savvy customer or just think like the customer they actually are.This is especially true of the newer generation (Generation Y / Millenials /etc.) who are ‘Digital Natives’, for whom most cannot remember a time beforethe Internet and the use of multiple screens is an everyday occurrence.

The aim is therefore to create understanding, encourageinnovative & agile ‘web 2.0’ thinking within a company and learn how to apply this within the modern working environment.

2. Customer-centric 

The concept of ‘User Centred Design’ has been successfullyutilised for over a decade now to create online experiences that put the userat the heart of the process, rather than just being a passive node that has todeal with whatever interface the system creates at the end.

This turns some business processes on their heads, as theway some corporate departments and product catalogues are structured are notnecessarily the way that users want to browse, search, consume, etc.

Be prepared to turn things upside down if it means thedifference between doing what you’ve always done and what needs to be done tomove forwards.

3. The connected corporate ecosystem

As more systems become interconnected and as we all learnthat data does not have to be re-entered if it already exist online in someform…. This will provide the opportunity for some data (e.g. inferred from auser’s browsing history) to be integrated with other data (e.g. explicitknowledge about a user’s age, purchase habits, etc.) and to significantlyreduce human errors such as those from simple data re-keying. The semantic webis almost upon us, is your business ready?

4. Use of Data for insight

Thanks to the Internet, every 2 days the human race nowcreates as much information as it did in its entire history up to 2003. Thisgrowth in ‘big data’ creates its own challenges (e.g. the storage and abilityto quickly access the right data, re-posted mis-information, etc.) as well asits own opportunities, such as an unprecedented amount of useful data on userbehaviour.  This therefore facilitates afar greater level of personalisation and supports various real-time activities& incentives such as individual offers and rewards (perhaps the very reasonwhy mega supermarket Tesco used & subsequently purchased DunnHumby forcustomer insight and data driven marketing purposes) plus then the future predictivecapabilities that may come from this.