Decisively Digital. Alexander Loth

of big data processing and cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and supports data-driven decision-making and the maker culture.

       Maker Culture

The maker culture encourages employees to think about what kind of apps, processes, or algorithms they could build for their organization. While it once required software development skills, building apps today can be done within minutes and without writing a single line of code. This creativity is not limited to apps; it also includes process automation and algorithms that can be easily reused in the entire organization.

      The maker culture is based on the strategic topics of artificial intelligence, process automation, blockchain, and Internet of Things (IoT), and it supports citizen data science.

Impact

      Every organization has a set of core competencies and unique assets. The digital strategy needs to identify specific differentiators that can unlock impact beyond the original core competencies and leverage the unique assets.

      Core competencies can manifest in different ways depending on the industry. Unique assets might be physical assets like retail stores, proximity to customers, or intellectual property. While some of these impacts are specific to core competencies and unique assets, some impacts are more generic and can be triggered by fostering a certain culture. Here are some examples:

       Attracting new employees, enabled by the collaborative culture

       Knowledge generation and exchange, enabled by the collaborative culture and the culture of data-driven decision-making

       Understanding customer behavior, enabled by the culture of data-driven decision-making and the culture of citizen data science

       Improving products and customer service, enabled by the culture of citizen data science and the maker culture

       Reducing time to market, enabled by the maker culture

      There are, of course, also certain impacts that cannot directly map to the culture but are conditioned by a strategic topic directly. Here are some noteworthy examples:

       Reducing total cost of ownership (TCO), enabled by big data processing and cloud computing

       Scalability, enabled by big data processing and cloud computing

       Agility, enabled by process automation, blockchain, and IoT

      Furthermore, it is possible that impact initiated by a certain culture helps to improve another culture within the organization, for example, by using the insights from remote work data to understand the way the team works (data-driven decision-making) and to modify future tasks and processes for better collaboration (collaborative culture).

Digital Capabilities

      Enabling impacts requires continually developing a wide range of digital capabilities. Let's stick with the previously mentioned examples and take a look at which digital capabilities would be required to pursue them.

       Attracting New Employees

       Unified communications: Using chat and video call beside traditional channels, such as email and phone

       Collaboration tools: Working together on notes, documents, spreadsheets, and so on

       Remote work: Working from everywhere with secure access to all company resources

       Knowledge Generation and Exchange

       Self-service business intelligence: Asking your own questions without tying up your traditional business intelligence (BI) team

       Visual analytics: Seeing and understanding patterns with interactive visual interfaces⁵

       Data literacy: Communicating insights for a human-information discourse

       Understanding Customer Behavior

       Stream processing: Streaming customer feedback and needs in real time

       Governed data discovery/mining: Acquiring new or enriching existing data sources that the organization can rely on

       Social media ingestion: Improving customer retention by leveraging social media data

       Improving Products and Customer Service

       Machine learning: Providing the ability to automatically learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed

       Chat bots and recommender systems: Providing information to users according to their preferences via a chat interface

       Human-in-the-loop: Leveraging the power of human intelligence to improve machine learning–based models

       Reducing Time to Market

       Low-code/no-code: Allowing citizen developers to drag and drop application components, connect them, and create platform-agnostic apps

       Application design (UI/UX): Creating products that provide a meaningful user interface (UI) and a relevant user experience (UX)

       Cybersecurity: Protecting computer systems from the damage or theft of data, as well as from service disruption

       Reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

       Serverless architecture: Eliminating the need for server software and hardware management

       Data center transformation: Migrating the on-premise IT infrastructure to a cloud hyper-scale environment

       DevOps: Shortening the development life cycle and providing continuous feature delivery

Completing Your Digital Strategy Big Picture

Once you’ve identified the impacts that you want to generate and the corresponding digital capabilities, it is time to complete your digital strategy big picture, as shown in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2 Digital strategy big picture

This digital strategy big picture serves as reference while you adopt a strategic topic, foster culture, generate impact, and implement digital capabilities. The template is available online.⁶

      While the first rows, strategic topic and culture, should be fairly static, the impact and digital capabilities vary depending on your industry and your current level of digital maturity and organizational readiness.

Impact Venn

Your digital strategy will not generate impact if you don't foster culture or acquire digital capabilities, as illustrated in Figure 1.3. As you will probably not start on a greenfield, it is important to identify and fill the missing pieces to generate impact.

For example, an organization wants to create apps and automate processes faster and therefore sets up a low-code/no-code platform. However, the platform