Developing an integrated digital strategy can play a key role in planning your business’s long-term future. It not only helps align your technology investment strategy, it may may also help you consider the future of processes and product/service lines within your business. As your business considers developing an integrated digital strategy, McKinsey & Company suggests for key steps to consider. These steps should be consider when adopting any new technology.
1. Assessment – Assess the impact of potential digital technologies. This includes potential cost-savings and increased profits. But this assessment should extend beyond the specific application at hand and consider how a specific technology might impact other departments, how it might drive automation, how it might relate to competitors, and more. When you complete an assessment, it would be worth consider multiple technologies at once. This might help you think through how technologies overlap, replicate and more.
2. Prioritize – Next you’ll need to consider impact of technologies. Considering short-term and long-term goals, what technologies make the most positive impact? This might help you begin to prioritize investments since most businesses can only take on one or two new technology shifts at a time.
3. Impact – How might a specific technology make an impact at every point in the business? The technology might require adapting processes to make sure the technology is a positive at each level. If there are potential anticipated problem areas, you can already begin to develop contingency plans.
4. Focus – As you consider long-term impacts of a digital technology strategy, you may realize that some lines of business may need to shift or even be eliminated over time. A comprehensive strategy can help you keep focuses on what is profitable for future growth and what may need to be changed or eliminated.
