What ‘doing digital’ really means, in one simple map

In my earlier post (Making sense of Digital: is “look at Uber and Airbnb” the best we can do?) I highlighted how we might be in danger of obsessing over what companies like Uber and Airbnb do, and how they’re disrupting existing industries; and thereby missing a bigger picture.

Uber and Airbnb are of course attention-grabbing, because they’ve used digital technologies to enable them to grow fast and serve massive customer bases – by co-ordinating external resources and managing market information (matching supply and demand) in new, more efficient ways. But digital technologies are also important because they can enable large, established organisations to act small, at scale.

So clearly there’s more to ‘what doing digital’ really means than ‘doing an Uber’. But we urgently need to find a way to lay everything out clearly – because everywhere we turn, we find that different people talk about ‘digital’ while meaning completely different things.

Here are the four groups we come across most often:

• When we listen to HR and Communications leaders talk about ‘doing digital’, they’re talking about how social, mobile and cloud technologies in particular affect the workplace and the ways that employees engage with each other and with the broader organisation/corporation.
• When we listen to marketing leaders talk about ‘doing digital’, they’re talking about how social, mobile, cloud, and analytics technologies are changing how the organisation needs to create experiences and engage differently with customers (other leaders may also be thinking about implications for partner and supplier engagement, too).
• When we listen to operational leaders, they’re thinking about how digital technologies can help the organisation co-ordinate internal processes and ‘things’ to create ‘digital operations’ capabilities.
• And lastly there’s strategists. They inhabit the realm of Uber, Airbnb, Upwork, Zopa, open innovation networks, and so on. These people are tasked with looking at digitally-powered strategies for new product approaches and changes to business models.

How are all these things connected?

Let’s start by backing up, and considering this:

Digital technologies are important because in combination, they can be used to co-ordinate resources (people, plant, machinery, infrastructure, market information, goods, materials, knowledge) more efficiently.

Now look at the picture below. What I’ve done here is split up the universe of ‘resources’ into internal and external resources (that’s the horizontal axis); and also (vertical axis) into resources which revolve principally around people and their knowledge, and other resources which revolve principally around processes and ‘things’ (plant, machinery, infrastructure, materials, assets etc).

I’ve also labelled four distinct digital domains – driven by very particular business priorities – one for each quadrant.

• When HR and Communications leaders talk about ‘doing digital’, they’re starting their exploration from the top-left quadrant.
• When marketing leaders talk about ‘doing digital’, they’re starting their exploration from the top-right quadrant.
• When operational leaders talk about ‘doing digital’, they’re starting their exploration from the bottom-left quadrant.
• And lastly, strategists tend to start their work in the bottom-right quadrant.

Of course when we dig a little deeper, we see that things are never as simple as they first seem. Different groups tend to start their explorations in one particular quadrant, but very soon (if they’re really exploring the potential opportunities and challenges of digital technologies correctly) they start to have to consider other quadrants too.

So actually the picture looks a little bit more complicated. Like this:

Nevertheless I hope you agree that this map of digital strategies is still pretty easy to get your head around.

Now we’re currently in the final stages of a major planning and design exercise here at MWD Advisors for 2016, and this map will play a big part in how we shape and present our research and services in 2016 and beyond.

SOURCE: MWD Advisors