Building a right strategy
People may love or hate strategies. Some like how strategy looks in PowerPoint or they like a high level of ambitions expressed by this document. In contrast, some tend to believe that this is the unnecessary corporate artefact and we as a company should rather spend resources on “doing something meaningful”. We disagree with both points of view.
For us, the right digitalization strategy is a cornerstone of what we do. Its main purpose is to make it clear for all of the involved and affected parties what we are trying to achieve, why we are doing so and how do we want to accomplish this task.
Sounds simple, and in reality, resulting strategy document can be just several pages long. But if you want to do it right, meaning it would be based on a deep understanding of your current situation, if you want to take into account all key driving forces affecting your company, people, markets, clients, competition and regulation, and, if you want to make sure that you have buy-in from your core team and values and goals behind the strategy are shared by all key stakeholders – it turns out to be a non-trivial task.
We are ready to help your leadership team in building or analyzing a digitalization strategy. Start doing things right from the very beginning. Don’t let the buzzwords lead you anywhere or ruin belief in transformation. Don’t let natural complications of a complex multi-dimensional change make your digital journey never start or never end. Build the right strategy.
Digitalization Roadmap
At the next stage of your digitalization process we recommend building a roadmap: a practical set of decisions, assumptions and priorities defining an implementation approach. The roadmap shall clearly articulate core components of the transformation, for example: streams, governance, collaboration and communication approach, measurements and KPIs, stages, roles and responsibilities, resource needs and many others. This is especially important if you have a big or distributed team of people involved in the execution of the digitalization process.
You can look at the roadmap as the main point of orchestration of all the initiatives and streams on which transformations rely (processes, people, systems etc).
For the SME going through the digitalization process, we can build a roadmap pretty fast – this should not be an overcomplicated process. However, for large multinational enterprise building a roadmap itself can take many months. But it is worth it as the more you invest in the beginning when the cost of the mistake is low, the more you save as you start the implementation or reach the point of no return.
The good old plan
And last but not the least – you need a good old plan for each and every change you are going to implement. While we do believe that most of the companies are very good at planning, sometimes it makes sense if you involve a consultant to review or align plans, identify gaps or look for improvements. We are ready to help you with building a proper plan for your transformation initiatives.