The digital world moves forward at a breakneck pace. Your digital strategy must reflect that speed.
Part eight of a series
While systems technologies have continued to change constantly since the ‘70s, digital takes it to a whole new level. There is no recipe book for combining everything that digital encompasses into successful, profitable offerings.
This pace of change requires digital leaders to approach adaption and innovation differently. Organizations that continue to utilize traditional, multi-year processes to conceptualize, approve, design, develop, test and deploy a product or service will only result in solutions that address yesterday’s opportunities with yesterday’s technologies.
How aggressively you change is a key, defining component of your digital strategy.
This reality is a daunting challenge for large, established organizations, particularly those that have entrenched R&D, portfolio management and product development processes that were designed to support small-scale refinements of products and services and adhere to regulatory compliance.
Silicon Valley and Internet startup companies, unencumbered with legacy businesses, continuously fine-tune their processes to try new things, get them to market quickly, learn from customer reactions and then either make adjustments and scale – OR scrap and focus elsewhere (hard to do when you’ve invested too much).
It’s a very different mindset, one that requires traditional companies to make adjustments in culture, process and leadership. Some of the biggest adjustments include:
- Introducing innovation functions within the organization and ultimately looking for innovation throughout the organization ( a whole topic in and of itself)
- Increasing velocity by piloting with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- Making data-based decisions
- Being willing to fail more often and increasing the number of balls in the air at the same time
- Putting technology and processes in place to quickly deploy and pilot new things.
How aggressively you change is a key, defining a component of your digital strategy. Easing into a new model in a parallel process, pilot project or part of change program are all potential approaches.
In my next post, I’ll talk about implementing a multi-speed engine as a way to start moving part of your organization at digital speed, while simultaneously maintaining legacy approaches.
