Digital Strategy

Preamble

The digital transformation induces fundamental changes for the exchanges between enterprises and their environment.

To begin with, their immersion into digital environments means that the traditional fences surrounding their IT systems are losing their relevance, being bypassed by massive data flows to be processed without delay.

Then, the induced osmosis upturns the competition playground and compels drastic changes in governance: less they fall behind, enterprises have to redefine their organization, systems, and processes.

Strategies are meant to draw passageways between current circumstances and conjectured horizons (Kader Attia)

New playground

Strategic thinking is first and foremost making differences with regard to markets, resources and assets, and time-frames. But what makes the digital revolution so disruptive is that it resets the ways differences are made:

  • Markets: the traditional distinctions between products and services are all but forgotten.
  • Resources and assets: with software, smart or otherwise, now tightly mixed in products fabric, and business processes now driven by knowledge, intangible assets are taking the lead on conventional ones.
  • Time-frames: strategies have for long been defined as a combination of anticipations, objectives and policies whose scope extends beyond managed horizons. But digital osmosis and the ironing out of markets and assets traditional boundaries are dissolving the milestones used to draw horizons perspectives.

New perspectives

To overcome these challenges enterprises strategies should focus on four pillars:

  • Governance: the immersion of enterprises in digital environments and the crumbling of traditional fences require in-depth changes in the assessment of enterprises capability and maturity, putting the focus on the ability to change.
  • Data and Information: massive and continuous inflows of data calls for a seamless integration of data analytics (perception), information models (reasoning), and knowledge (decision-making).
  • Security & Confidentiality: new regulatory environments and costs of privacy breaches call for a clear distinction between data tied to identified individuals and information associated to designed categories.
  • Innovation: digital environments induce a new order of magnitude for the pace of technological change. Making opportunities from changes can only be achieved through collaboration mechanisms harnessing enterprise knowledge management to environments intakes.

FURTHER READING

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