Digital Business Innovation (CDO)
Digitization, Chief Digital Officer - what has changed?
Whether a corporate group, large corporation or owner-managed company - everyone has to face the "digital age" with complex challenges. New, digitally affine target groups demand offerings that are simple and networked and make specific use of new technologies "use case". As a result, new business models are emerging, industry boundaries are blurring, and new competitors are emerging rapidly. What was elementary yesterday may be irrelevant tomorrow.
At the same time, it is precisely these dynamics that are causing complexity to increase enormously within organizations and in interaction with partners: How can new initiatives be networked and managed in a way that creates synergies with the core business and beyond the boundaries of the company? What framework conditions must be created for the implementation of the initiatives on the one hand and for their sustainable anchoring in the organization and culture on the other? These are questions that affect the entire company and therefore need to be addressed throughout the company.
This is also shown by the development of the role of the CDO - originally intended as the central driver and "chief" of digital initiatives. The role model shifts once the impulse for digital transformation is given. The CDO role is "no longer mandatory", his tasks flow into different roles and areas and are thus integrated holistically into the company. This makes it clear that digitization is not (any longer) a single discipline but becomes part of all corporate functions and is only successful in the long term if it runs through the entire organization and is holistically coordinated and implemented.
Development of customer-centric and networked business models
To come straight to the point, there is no ideal-typical and chronological path to customer-centric and networked business models. Depending on the company-specific situation and digital maturity level, there are different strands of action. For the classification and structured processing of these, we focus on three central value creation stages on the "journey" to customer-centric and networked business models.
Digital Innovation - Development of competitive corporate, digitization and product strategies
The first question is: what will characterize the business models of the future? Which offers, which business models will be present on the market in the future and how can they be harmonized with existing business and partners? The clear and precise determination of the current status as well as the outlining of strategic scenarios are crucial here. By means of a "digital localization" and business model analysis, optimization potentials in strategy and business model can be identified and an action plan for the definition of a digitization strategy can be determined. New customer-centric and networked business model scenarios are developed over three evolutionary stages - from product orientation to company-wide anchoring to platform-driven ecosystem expansion.
Digital Delivery - Successful implementation of digitization initiatives
Innovation Labs, Design Sprints and other ideation formats help to generate innovation potential, but they will come to nothing if the ideas and concepts are not implemented in a consistent and structured way. This is where "Digital Delivery" sets in, in the transition from strategic planning to the implementation of the newly developed concept. The skills and tools needed to get to the operational implementation stage must be identified, the team put together, the right project environment created and, last but not least, a precisely tailored development process set up for the product and the customer. The focus here is on lean concepts to enable the project organization to operate efficiently and react quickly. The approach of an agile project and team organization, in which new products are implemented close to the customer and with a low time-to-market, is a very important lever here. When launching products on the market, all involved areas such as marketing, committee and stakeholder management must be orchestrated, and consistent attention must be paid to ensuring that product vision and customer feedback set the direction.
Digital Embedding - anchoring digital transformation sustainably
The digital transformation is not yet in the least completed with the definition of future strategies and business model scenarios, the operationalization of these and already completed market launches. The question of what the organizational model will look like in a company-wide context that will enable the operation and management of the new business in the long term remains unresolved. How is scalability ensured? The focus here is on defining and evaluating the appropriate organizational form in order to link the new business with the core business in the best possible way. This can take place within the company but does not have to. Often, new and core business differ so strongly at the beginning that a (temporary) spin-off can make sense. Regardless of this, an innovative culture and flexible structure must be created within the organization in order to anchor the digital transformation successfully in the long term. Here too, the keyword is "agile". The establishment of an agile way of working makes it possible, for example, through a culture of constant learning and heterogeneous team composition, to deliver better results in the shortest possible time.
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