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Formalize Your Digital Business Strategy

Stay relevant in an evolving digital economy.

Your organization already has a digital strategy, but there is a lack of understanding of what digital means across the enterprise. Digital investments have been made in the past but failed to yield or demonstrate business value. Given the pace of change, the current digital strategy is outdated, and new digital opportunities need to be identified to inform the technology innovation roadmap.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Turn your digital strategy into a compelling change story that will create a unified vision of how you want to transform your business.

Impact and Result

  • Identify new digitally enabled growth opportunities.
  • Understand which digital ideas yield the biggest return and the value they generate for the organization.
  • Understand the impact of opportunities on your business capabilities.
  • Map a customer journey to identify opportunities to transform stakeholder experiences.

Formalize Your Digital Business Strategy Research & Tools

1. Formalize Your Digital Business Strategy – a document that walks you through a series of activities to help brainstorm and ideate on possible new digital opportunities as an input into building your business case for a new IT innovation roadmap.

Knowing which digital opportunities create the greatest business value requires a structured approach to ideate, prioritize, and understand the value they create for the business to help inform the creation of your business case for investment approval.


Formalize Your Digital Business Strategy

Stay relevant in an evolving digital economy

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Common Obstacles

Solution

  • Since 2020, the environment has been volatile, leading many CIOs to rethink their priorities and strategies.
  • The organization already has a digital strategy, but there is a lack of understanding of what digital means across the enterprise.
  • Digital investments have been made but fail to demonstrate the business value.
  • The current digital strategy was developed in isolation and failed to garner consensus on a common understanding of the digital vision from across the business.
  • CIOs struggle to understand what existing capabilities need to transform or what new digital capabilities are needed to support the digital ambitions.
  • The existing Digital Strategy is synonymous with the IT Strategy.
  • Identify new digitally enabled growth opportunities.
  • Understand which digital ideas yield the biggest return and the value they generate for the organization.
  • Understand the impact of opportunities on your business capabilities.
  • Map the customer journey to identify opportunities to transform the stakeholder experience.

Info-Tech Insight

Turn your existing digital strategy into a compelling change story that will create a unified vision of how you want to transform your business.

Info-Tech’s Digital Transformation Journey

Your journey: An IT roadmap for your Digital Business Strategy

The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's Digital Transformation Journey.

By now, you understand your current business context and capabilities

The image contains a screenshot of the IT roadmap for your Digital Business Strategy.

By this point you have leveraged industry roundtables to better understand the art of the possible, exploring global trends, shifts in market forces, customer needs, emerging technologies, and economic forecasts to establish your business objectives and innovation goals.

Now you need to formalize digital business strategy.

Phase 1: Industry Trends Report

The image contains a screenshot of phase 1 industry trends report.

Phase 2: Digital Maturity Assessment

The image contains a screenshot of phase 2 digital maturity assessment.

Phase 3: Zero-In on Business Objectives

The image contains a screenshot of phase 3 Zero-in on business objectives.

Business and innovation goals are established through stakeholder interviews and a heatmap of your current capabilities for transformation.

Since 2020, market dynamics have forced organizations to reassess their strategies

The unprecedented pace of global disruptions has become both a curse and a silver lining for many CIOs. The ability to maximize the value of digital will be vital to remain relevant in the new digital economy.

The image contains a screenshot of an image that demonstrates how market dynamics force organizations to reassess their strategies.

Formalize your digital strategy to address industry trends and market dynamics

The goal of this phase is to ensure the scope of the current digital strategy reflects the right opportunities to allocate capital to resources, assets, and capabilities to drive strategic growth and operational efficiency.

There are three key activities outlined in this deck that that can be undertaken by industry members to help evolve their current digital business strategy.

  1. Identify New Digitally Enabled Growth Opportunities
    • Host an ideation session to identify new leapfrog ideas
    • Discuss assumptions, value drivers, and risks
    • Translate ideas into opportunities and consolidate
  2. Evaluate New Digital Opportunities and Business Capabilities
    • Build an opportunity profile
    • Identify business capabilities for transformation
  3. Transform Stakeholder Journeys
    • Understand the impact of opportunities on value-chains
    • Identify stakeholder personas
    • Build a stakeholder journey map
    • Compile your new list of digital opportunities
The image contains a screenshot of Formalize your digital business strategy.

Info-Tech’s approach

  1. Identify New Digital Opportunities
    • Conduct an ideation session
    • Identify leapfrog ideas from trends
    • Evaluate each leapfrog idea to define opportunity
  2. Evaluate Opportunities and Business Capabilities
    • Build Opportunity Profile
    • Understand the impact of opportunities on business capabilities
  3. Transform Stakeholder Journeys
    • Analyze value chains
    • Map your Stakeholder Journey
    • Breakdown opportunities into initiatives

Overview of Key Activities

Formalize your digital business strategy

Methodology

Members Engaged

  • CIO
  • Business Executives

Info-Tech

  • Industry Analyst
  • Executive Advisor

Phase 1: New Digital Opportunities

Phase 2: Evaluate Opportunities and Business Capabilities

Phase 3: Transform Stakeholder Journeys

Content Leveraged

  • Digital Business Strategy blueprint
  • Client’s Business Architecture
  1. Hold an ideation session with business executives.
    • Review relevant reports on industry trends, market shifts, and emerging technologies.
    • Establish guiding principles for digital transformation.
    • Leverage a trend-analysis approach to determine the most impactful and relevant trends.
    • From tends, elicit leapfrog ideas for growth opportunities.
    • For each idea, engage in discussion on assumptions, value drivers, benefits, and risks.
  1. Create opportunity profiles.
    • Evaluate each opportunity to determine if it is important to turn into initiatives
  2. Evaluate the impact of opportunities on your business capabilities.
    • Leverage a value-chain analysis to assess the impact of the opportunity across value chains in order to understand the impact across your business capabilities.
  1. Map stakeholder journey:
    • Identify stakeholder personas
    • Identify one journey scenario
    • Map stakeholder journey
    • Consolidate opportunities
  2. Breakdown opportunities into actional initiatives
    • Brainstorm priority initiatives against opportunities.

Deliverable:

Client’s Digital Business Strategy

Phase 1: Deliverable

  1. Compiled list of leapfrog ideas for new growth opportunities

Phase 2: Deliverables

  1. Opportunity Profile
  2. Business Capability Impact

Phase 3: Deliverables

  1. Opportunity Profile
  2. Business Capability Impact

Glossary of Terms

LEAPFROG IDEAS

The concept was originally developed in the area of industrial organizations and economic growth. Leapfrogging is the notion that organizations can identify opportunities to skip one or several stages ahead of their competitors.

DIGITAL OPPORTUNITIES

Opening of new possibilities to transform or change your business model and create operational efficiencies and customer experiences through the adoption of digital platforms, solutions, and capabilities.

INITIATIVES

Breakdown of opportunities into actionable initiatives that creates value for organizations through new or changes to business models, operational efficiencies, and customer experiences.

  1. LEAPFROG IDEAS:
    • Precision medicine
  2. DIGITAL OPPORTUNITY:
    • Machine Learning to sniff out pre-cancer cells
  3. INITIATIVES:
    1. Define genomic analytics capabilities and recruit
    2. Data quality and cleansing review
    3. Implement Machine Learning SW

Stay relevant in an evolving digital economy.

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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Authors

Joanne Lee

Kim Osborne Rodriguez

Contributors

  • Jack Hakimian, VP, Research, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Charl Lombard, President, Digital Transformation Consulting, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Kim Osborne-Rodriguez, Research Director, CIO Strategy, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Mike Tweedie, Practice Lead, CIO Strategy, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Michael Alemany, Vice President, Digital Transformation Consulting, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Duane Cooney, Executive Counselor, Healthcare, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Denis Goulet, Senior Workshop Director, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Jay Cappis, Executive Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Christine Brick, Executive Advisor, Info-Tech Research Group
  • Ross Armstrong, Principal, Research Director, Info-Tech Research Group
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