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What is the recipe for becoming a Digital Master?

In today’s world of business, everyone is moving towards a Digital Transformation. Considering we are dealing with different types of businesses, we would like to study the forces inside a business that would make being a Digital Master a reality.

Digital Master is a business that is using the IoT and Digital technologies in the best possible way. By implementing these digital technologies into their business, they have drastically improved their overall success whilst giving themselves an advantage over competitors. In other words, they use these technologies to improve their processes and by incorporating this new business model into multiple layers of the organization, are benefitting significantly from it.

Unfortunately, despite this clear success, only 15% of businesses are close to becoming Digital Masters and many business owners are struggling on the path to achieving said status.

So, let’s see how we can categorize a business and its governance in terms of Digital master.

We use the quadrant graph below to divide businesses into four distinct groups:

Mazi Hosseini CEO Arshon Technology, founder of iotLINKS

Every company you review falls somewhere on the graph above. (Ref.: Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation book by George Westerman and Ditier Bonnet)

To better understand, we will review all types of businesses.

Imagine a company just started and lacks leadership and digital capabilities. This company sits in the lower-left square.

A company that has been in business for many years successfully yet suffers due to a lack of digital capabilities would be placed in the bottom right square. Due to the management’s absence of exposure to digital technology, they have no clear vision of what is needed to combat these struggles.

Now imagine a successful technology startup already rich in digital technology but their exposure in business is new, and their leadership is young with less experience. This company would sit in the upper left quadrant.

And finally, a company strong in both leadership and digital capabilities would sit in the upper right square. Examples of companies like this would be GE, Netflix, Apple, etc.

Where we are and where we are going?

As a business owner, the first step is honesty. Especially with ourselves. We need to figure out where the business currently stands, and think about where we need to be in order to increase success.

Place your business somewhere on the quadrant graph. Looking at the categories we can see where we are currently and develop a plan of execution to become a Digital Master.

The goal is planning out the most efficient way to get into that top right corner

The goal is planning out the most efficient way to get into that top right corner.

We would like to consider each case and discuss some general ideas and action plans to make sure we continue moving in the right direction.

Starters

We will refer to lower left companies as starters. Ample effort will be needed and it won’t come without its challenges.

A starter company has minimal exposure in business and it has yet to establish enough capital as well as resources to fully integrate its digital strategy just yet. The first step is to increase marketing exposure before looking to implement the digital business model. These steps are not one size fits all and should be adapted to fit the current status of your business.

If a business is not directly technology-oriented

If a business is not directly technology-oriented, then it should carefully investigate digital services to avoid overwhelming the business’ financials and resources. Then, begin to apply the technology as needed by carefully aiming to achieve multiple smaller goals over one big one.

Long-term planning is always good, but for a startup, it must be in multiple smaller steps to make sure ROI is achieved in a shorter time frame to help the business grow organically and mitigate risks.

Another good practice for starters is to look into strategic partners and implement the digital technology with the help of those familiar with the model. Doing this can prevent potential mistakes before they happen.

Sometimes smaller companies’ success is strongly based on smart partnerships with larger players helping them focus on addressing a larger problem.

Fashionistas

These are groups of companies that are not the best in terms of business leadership but have a lot of exposure and familiarity with digital business models. They may find themselves unable to coordinate the business properly to make the whole company move cohesively. In other words, business flow is not optimized, the target market sector is not reached, and they are not successfully increasing profit as well as customer satisfaction.

Imagine you have the best website and the best CRM

Imagine you have the best website and the best CRM. If these two are not properly connected, you will find yourself missing out on optimal results.

We call these groups digitally equipped but in a disconnected manner.

For these companies, we need to look at the business at a higher level, try to connect the moving parts and get all these parts moving in unison. By using digital assets properly, and becoming more customer-oriented, the business will see a significant jump in success.

There are many businesses like this one that appears to be advanced, yet due to lack of proper direction, suffer in silence.

Conservatives

Also referred to as “Traditional Businesses”, are those that are well established and have historically done well. Despite their success, they have very limited exposure to technology and advances in business models.

Many of these businesses fear it is too hard to change and incorporate digital technology into their current models. Some have also tried with improper direction to no avail. They see themselves slowly falling behind their competitors.

Although they are profitable

Although they are profitable, they are in danger of losing to forward-thinking companies.

These companies should hire digital consultants to review and incorporate the digital technologies into the traditional processes and work with the business to become digital masters.

Digital Masters

These are established companies that have incorporated digital technology into many layers of their business.

They are typically more successful than other businesses

They are typically more successful than other businesses. Their only advice is to always review their incorporation of digital help to constantly combat problems that may arise, as well as continue improving and evolving upon their model.

There is no stop to Digital Transformation, regardless of where you stand!

Mazi Hosseini CEO Arshon Technology, founder of iotLINKS

Sophia Masters
Sophia Masters
Sophia Masters is our politics writer, and she’s always across the latest breaking stories when it comes to often crazy world of politics. She’s skilled at filtering out the ‘boring bits’ of politics and brings her readers all the juicy detail and analysis.

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