Digitize Your Business Strategy Before It’s Too Late

In 2018, every CEO wants to have a “digital strategy” – which means at least we’ve made some progress over the past five years!

To solve what they perceive to be the immediate challenge, CEOs adopt a range of tactics. Some, like Patrice Louvet at Ralph Lauren, hire a fresh new “chief digital officer” to lead digital.

Others challenge the CMO or CIO to shape the firm’s “digital strategy.” Along the way, some former CIOs get hired as CDOs, and while some CEOs will take on the challenge themselves, many will fail.

But, do CEOs really understand what they are asking for?

Digital Strategy Is Business Strategy

Tomorrow’s CEOs must shape business strategy around digital capabilities: ING’s CEO, Ralph Hamers, wants ING to be seen as a tech company with a banking license. This is how tomorrow’s CEOs need to think about their business.

If you don’t redesign and reimagine your business around digital capabilities, your business will be disrupted. When this happens, you will witness the gradual erosion of your customer base. And, like the proverbial frog in a slowly heating pan of water, you won’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late.

When will this happen to your business? The chances are, it has already started, and your business is the frog! While the real answer varies by industry, no matter your industry, it will happen unless you reshape your business for the digital era.

Pie chart showing tech impact
Source: “Digitize Your Business Strategy” Forrester report, February 2018

Remember, Moore’s Law continues to accelerate the evolution of technology. It’s only going to get faster. Alongside this, your customers’ expectations will continue evolve just as rapidly. The mobile app revolution has so dramatically changed how people engage with technology that your customers and employees expect your firm’s digital experiences to match the best they have today.

To simply keep up, you must reshape your company to evolve and adapt at the speed of technology and market changes. To win, you must learn to think differently and rewrite the rules of your industry. You must digitize your business strategy.

In “Digitize Your Business Strategy” – the foundational strategy report for Forrester’s newly revised digital business playbook – we examine the types of strategic focus found across three levels of digital maturity, and we make recommendations for how you can help accelerate your company’s digital evolution.