Digital Strategy Burps

McKinsey claims that many organisations are making serious mistakes with Digital Strategies.

Putting aside thos companies whose strategies are just a wish list of possible opportunities, McKinsey believes that typically there are 5 issues with enterprise Digital Transformation Strategies:

1. Unclear definitions;
2. Misunderstanding the changing economics that digital is driving;
3. Overlooking eco-systems;
4. Focusing on familiar competitive threats, rather than emerging ones;
5. Failing to understand that it's not just existing business that needs to be digitised - and not discarded - but that new businesses need to be invented, too.

 Though they note that in some industries, digital is accentuating the gap between winners and losers, with small numbers of winners grabbing huge market share and squeezing out the losers, whilst they also change the nature of the market.

Though more pragmatically, at a recent Gartner conference four CIOs spoke about the practicalities and emphasised focusing customer and people outcomes and experiences, using demonstrators to illustrate cross fiunctional opportunities and experimentation to build new business opportunities. Here too there was a theme of building on the existing legacy capabilities to blend the existing with new opportunities.

Analysis by the Boston Consulting Group reinforces some more orthodox lessons:

1. Harness the Power of Data
2. Redefine Your Customer's Journey
3. Build Digital Capability Through the Whole Organisation
4. Transform Governance and Explore Collaborative Ways of Working
5. Re-inforce Innovation Capabilities

 Broadly speaking this all fits with the DAF framework and principles contained within the Way of DAU.