by Jim Sinur
Discussion about digital can leave some organizations with a sour taste in their mouths, and for good reason. Large consultancy firms can make one feel like they hold the recipes for digital and if they are willing to part with millions, these firms can make organizations feel like master chefs.
Your IT department, backed by deep research from high-priced research firms, can also provide some appetizing tasting plates of various digital technologies to choose from in the future. These approaches have created a bad taste in many organizations’ mouths. Even if your organization is already digital, it could be more digital with some practical steps, unless your industry is under duress to create a new business model. Here are three practical approaches to create the “Digital Donuts” (see Figure 1).
Create a Better Customer Experience
Today, the customer experience is crucial for maintaining consumer loyalty and attracting new prospects. This doesn’t mean that your business model is broken, however. It just means your organization should make it easier to conduct business—now and in the future.
There are a number of efforts that can supercharge the customer experience. Of course, making things mobile, aggregating data from legacy systems, and eliminating unnecessary keying through automation are no-brainer efforts. Mapping and measuring customer journeys are the next step to remove friction in the processes and point out opportunities for more automation, chatbots, and digital assistants. If your organization is bogged down with legacy overburden, significant wrapping may be required to create processes and customer journeys.
Pick a Business Optimization Opportunity
While business optimization has been an ongoing drive for most organizations, these efforts can be supercharged by process mining leveraging timelines, predictive analytics, machine learning, and various forms of process automation.
There is also a new emphasis on resource optimization and knowledge assistance for human and software bots. More straight-through processing and assisted exceptions are growing in popularity; this requires a more precise closed-loop approach to decision management assisted by no-code decision approaches.
Pick a Business Differentiation Approach
Parallel to investments in customer experience and optimizations, organizations can sandbox new business approaches by trying new processes in a failsafe environment. When time to market makes a difference, buying additional companies that represent a great jump-start to a new business model is typically reserved for digitally savvy organizations.
Net; Net
Don’t let others make your organization feel digitally unsavory. There are many great digital recipes. Your organization is probably digital already, but now is the time to make choices to become more digital by leveraging the best business direction possible. Since digital allows for better outcomes in a speedy and agile fashion, some directions can be corrected in-flight with today’s digital approaches that leverage decision management, more automation, and no/low-code approaches. Many of these flexible digital technologies are embedded in Digital Business Platforms (DBPs).
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