Driving Digital Strategy |
The book "Driving Digital Strategy", by Sunil Gupta, came at the right time as I have been studying many aspects of the business transformation and the disruption that is happening across the different industries.
In this era, as a company leaders, just doing what brought you to this present, not embracing change, not renewing yourself, and important aspects of your business; is an indication that your ego, or comfort, or your fear to change, is not allowing you to move forward... and that potentially will be the "end". That "end" can come in one year, two... perhaps five years... but make no mistake, it is coming.
The introduction of this book have key notes that I found extremely relevant to my current research. One of them being the following:
- "The leaders who achieve 'transformative' results go all-in on digital. That is they don't treat digital strategy as separate from their overall strategy. Instead they lead with a digital-first mentality and make sure their digital strategy touches ALL aspects of their organizations"
As I continued reading, I found in this book the same question that I have been placing in my internet searches, as part of the research: "Where companies go wrong with their digital strategies". The point of view of the writer is interesting as it presents around three (3) strategies:
- "creating an independent unit is like launching a speedboat to turn around a large ship. Often the speedboat takes off but does little to move the ship".
- "To run experiments". Doing experiments out of control over the organization groups causes a proliferation that causes silos, preventing synergies. Too many initiatives, going in different directions, with the same goal or intentions, causing multiple investment streams, and therefore causing issues for the organization.
- "Leverage technology to reduce costs and improve efficiency of operations". Improving efficiencies and minimizing cost are good strategies and technology is one of the elements to use. However is when you rely solely on this approach when the formula may or may not be flawed.
To conclude this post, I believe is true that "some" are using "band-aid" for the real problems around the organizations, and in a lot of cases are full of cliché approaches instead of truly making digital strategy and integral part of the overall business strategy.
I could not have said it any better, that DIGITAL STRATEGY IS NOT A SEPARATE EXERCISE, it is an essential piece and " you must embed it into the operations and DNA of your organization".