Are your digital initiatives truly aligned with the core of your business? Can you respond swiftly to market changes? Have you taken the time recently to assess your tech stack and processes lately? Do they hinder or enable your future growth and new business opportunities?
Your digital initiatives are business critical like never before and thus must be an integrated part of your business strategy. Why? Because industries, businesses and products are increasingly being disrupted by technological advancements and innovation. The average lifespan of a company on the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index in 2020 was just over 21 years, compared to 32 years in 1965. There is a clear long-term trend of declining corporate longevity – also for smaller businesses. Studies suggest that the lifespan in the year 2027 will be, on average, only 12 years.
This is why digital understanding and digital initiatives is a matter for Executives. Executives need to understand that technology, IT architecture and digital decisions make up an important cornerstone for future manoeuvrability and for making bold business moves. This could be business moves like launching a new low-end brand, applying a new pricing structure, activating new business models – or something completely different you were not prepared for.
Set Your Business Up for Success with a Digital Roadmap
A way of choosing and prioritising the right digital initiatives is to anchor them in a digital roadmap. A digital roadmap is a plan that outlines an organisation’s digital journey towards a new business state. The digital roadmap provides a clear and comprehensive plan for how an organisation can leverage technology and digital capabilities to improve it’s operations, enhance customer experience and drive profitable growth. And most importantly, a digital roadmap is also the key to building your fundament in an adaptable, flexible and composable way – prepared for future changes.
Read more about adaptable and flexible IT architecture here:
A key element of the digital roadmap is knowing that the world is constantly changing. Thus, digital roadmaps must be handled agile. Once you have built a digital roadmap that supports business growth and profitability - and you know the interdependencies amongst the initiatives, you can start executing. But do not start to break down the individual project into details prior to the initiation of the project. The primary reasons for that are:
- Requirements can become outdated before the project even begins
- New technology can change scope
- Wireframes and visual rendering do not always translate well into digital solutions or might be changed as stakeholders shift priorities or requirements change
Want to read more? In our most recent white paper, we elaborate on why tech is a matter for executives and why working with digital roadmaps is an extremely useful tool in setting your company up to be ready for change.
Download our white paper ”Your future digital roadmap should be agile and profitable” here and get the full picture.
Our white paper contains +20 pages of insights about working with digital roadmaps on an executive level.
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