Friday, December 25, 2015

Digital Master Holiday Intense Tuning Chap 3: Five Points of Digital Strategy

The strategy is the roadmap to navigate through the business's digital journey.

The strategy is the art of designing a way of navigating and effectively utilizing available resources to attain a clearly defined objective. However, in many business contexts, the word strategy is demotivating. Some organizations have strategy meetings days and weeks only to go around in circles. Now businesses step deeper and deeper into the digital era, in which everything is touched by digital technologies, but how do they put effort on reshaping the digital version of corporation strategy?

Digital TouchPoint: The traditional strategy is the view via narrow “frame,” but digital strategy view is broader to oversee business ecosystem.The traditional strategy-execution are linear steps, but digital strategy execution is an iterative continuum. Thus, the radical digital strategy shall not only put emphasis on defining how to take advantage of digital technologies, but also refine the broader digital effects, which include culture factor, agility trait, and business maturity. Digital strategy includes all kinds of digital touch points that help businesses get to the strategic objectives in a more structural, adaptive and cooperative way.


Digital Focal Point: One of the important aspects in strategy making is to make choices, and set priorities to maximize the business benefits. These can range from an enterprise focus, which considers the broader opportunities and risks that digital can bring in. So it also requires the new focal point of strategy such as, people centricity (human touch) will become more central to competitive advantage; cross-functional collaborations multiply and enforce the effectiveness of strategy execution, and organizational structure is becoming flatter. Further, a new strategy implies a lot of change and hence capital investments. It is not like you can change a strategy at no cost. Therefore, one has to be very careful before coming up with the suitable strategy, strong focus, and commitment. Things will change here and there along the way, indeed as to the choice of routes to the destination.


Digital Inflection Point: Many organizations are at the inflection point for digital transformation, from strategy perspective, it means digital strategy need to look holistically into the business ecosystem and try to answer the big WHY- is it critical for such digital paradigm shift; WHAT are current business problems need to be solved, and HOW - to set guidelines to enable changes, and HOW MANY - measuring the right things before measuring them right.


Digital Decision Point: Decision points are connecting strategy making and strategy execution. A combination of internal and external factors needs to be considered to achieve a winning digital strategy. You have to think about people, products, customers, competitors, etc. Due to the “VUCA” digital characteristics, having the right information to make the right decisions at the right time by the right people is simply one of the most challenging management tasks facing in digital organizations.


Digital Practice Point: Digital strategy management practices need to be proactive, not reactive. A digital strategy is just as much about knowing what you will not do as it is about knowing what you will do. Stay within what you will do in the strategic forum, but change some priorities or weight of effort in the short term, be opportunistic about emerging event, and you will reach your goal. So it is not about the plan; rather, it is about the planning process that you will go through continuously as you implement the strategy. Digital strategy is more dynamic, inclusive and informative. And digital strategy needs to be shifted from top-down to operational inclusion, from linear, static to cascading continuum, and from inside-out, operation focus to outside-in customer centricity, getting more perspectives about the future, and making digital strategy more future proof.


Digital Master Tuning XX: Is Digital Strategy “Anti-Strategy”? In many contexts, the word strategy is demotivating. Some organizations have strategy meetings days and weeks only to go around in circles. The traditional strategy is more like a “shelf-ware” - the document put on the shelf,  instead of the shared guide to compass the business transformation journey. What are the essential elements and unique styles of digital strategy to groom a Digital Master? And how to rejuvenate the fresh strategic thinking and crafting, is digital strategy “anti-strategy”?


Digital Master Tuning XXXXVIII: How to Make Strategy Work under Uncertainty. VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) is digital new normal, as complexity and uncertainty increasing, the connection between any single individual organization’s strategy, and their tactical plans and actions can become diluted and disconnected. How to craft a good strategy, and make strategy executable under such uncertainty and unpredictability in order to transform the business into the Digital Master?


Digital Master Tuning #55: How to Mind the Gap between Strategy and Execution? As companies around the world transform themselves into digital business that is based on ‎information, innovation, and intelligence, their ability to well align the strategy and execution, for delivering the solid result; their capability to explore intangible assets (leadership, culture, innovation, knowledge etc) has become far more decisive than their ‎ability to invest in and manage physical assets.


Digital Master Tuning #66: Three Perspectives in Strategy Planning. Today’s businesses are over-complicated and hyper-connected, hence, strategy planning also becomes a more challenging and complex scenario. Who should participate strategy making, how are you anticipating and preparing for the road ahead, without anticipation, any strategy you develop is flawed by design?


Digital Master Tuning #75: How to Align Digital Vision with Strategy? In many organizations, vision is just a statement written on the wall and strategy is the set of documents put on the shelf. Usually, VISION is left as a corporate requirement, and strategy is not broadly understood. Metaphorically, vision is your destination, and strategy is like a GPS, to navigate you through. So first things first, how to align digital vision with strategy and keep the end in mind to business your business as a Digital Master?


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1 comments:

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