Effecting meaningful corporate digital strategy

In our previous strategy-focused installment, we examined the practical utility of digital strategy, explaining how strong digital strategy guides decision-making and behavior over time. Now, let’s put strategy to work in the corporate environment.

You’ve accomplished the mandate. You’ve paid the consultants, worked the sessions, refined the impact statements, summarized everything into a single overflowing slide, and crushed the deadline. You’ve got your digital strategy.

You’ve also probably become your corporate digital strategy’s champion (scapegoat?), and find yourself straddling a tenuous dichotomy: it took a lot to get here, but everything we just wrote about your work to date doesn’t really matter anymore:

• Management’s bought in (until the next priority)
• Stakeholders committed to your plan (for now)
• Resources have been allocated (until the next fire)
• Budget’s there (until next quarter’s results)

Incremental value delivery, disciplined fundamentals, and implementation foresight will help your strategy become a self-sustaining success. However, like every other initiative’s champion, you can only maintain your grip on the reins until day-to-day churn subsumes participants. You’ve got ~6 weeks to make your first felt impact. Remember, you’re only a scapegoat if you fail!

Presuming your strategy itself is sound (check below), digital strategies die in implementation for five reasons:

1. Losing sponsors’ trust and/or faith
2. Running out the clock before obtaining results
3. Absorbing too much time from other departments
4. Ballooning way beyond tolerable budgets
5. Crossing a critical business need or core function

All of these occur when the strategy’s champion forgets (or never understands) the implied part of their imperative. “Digitize x for the business” contains a clear denotation and an unspoken connotation:

• Denotation: make digital
• Connotation: make change

That ambiguity combines with unstated expectations to grant champions license to ignore or overfocus on one facet at the expense of the other. Champions who overdo digital production generally overdeliver in a way the business can’t ingest or disappear to work in isolation, causing the organization to delay, reject, and refuse to onboard whatever they’ve made.

Worse, champions who overdo change management and underdo production expose themselves to increasing technical and delivery risk as time elapses. When they crash after being exposed as a do-nothing, they leave the organization without much new knowledge for its investment.

Established, non-digital organizations expect a digital strategy to shift the business, not disrupt it. You’re championing a course adjustment or a growth, not driving a radical vacillation, transformation, or tinkering endlessly like some fabled skunk works with a blank check.

Start with your strategy as-is and check it against last article’s takeaway test. Does your strategy:

1. Keep distracting or bad ideas off the table?
2. Aid prioritization?
3. Guide change away from worse ideas?
4. Clarify avenues for everyone’s participation?
5. Endure beyond one champion’s force of will?
6. Focus attention on a desired experience?

If yes to most, proceed!

Anyone in modern business can make an exquisite action plan, so we’re certain you’ve already thought through steps 1–n and their associated minutiae which you can compose into program increments.

Instead of planning increments in a vacuum, apply another test to each increment. A good digital strategy execution has increments that are simultaneously offensive and defensive:

• Offensive in that you are pursuing something large and valuable (are you?)
• Defensive in that a failure or stoppage at that increment still yields value (will it?)

Therefore each increment in your action register must deliver a result (e.g. functioning code) and/or insight (e.g. user preference):

ACTION must RESULT or INSIGHT

Why? As champion, you need tangible, communicable, worthwhile outputs to keep your strategy alive and making progress. If an action’s too big to produce a clear result or insight, shrink or divide it. Too nebulous? Question it. Too expensive? Refocus. Everyone supporting your initiative from above and below needs small wins to feel and maintain progress. Without meaningful progress, well-meaning initiatives congeal into depressing makework sinkholes.

You’ll also need the leadership fortitude to resist making every action’s designated outcome a pure work result (“built X”). Never underestimate insight outputs: aggressively engaging the unknown frequently yields game-changing results. Better to find out early that your new tool’s performance sucks instead of days before go-live.

Politically, play each small output like a key on the grand piano you’re constructing. Compose your little victories into team-aligning ballads, mood-setting lounge tracks, and attention-grabbing shock anthems that prove your strategy’s working and that said work matters. Why can’t your teams just work in solitude until they’re done? Because the business you serve receives that type of effort as one massive surprise!

If a digital strategy doesn’t deliver and operationalize pieces inside its funding cycle, it never survives. Survive and thrive by focusing on yield per increment, respecting the fundamentals, and sidestepping known pitfalls.

Powerful increment yield

As you work increment by increment, your digital strategy must:

• Maintain a tight grip on relevant opportunity. Identify a novel problem, visible from your unique perspective, that you are the obvious solution to.
• Prove value. “Everybody has a plan till they get punched in the mouth”. Ensure that appropriate facets of the strategy make contact with the problem as quickly and as cheaply as possible. How?
• Ensure that changes are desirable for those in the value chain. Acceptable at the minimum.
• Value must amplify advantage, enhancing your business’s core competencies. “Transformation” is more of a rearview mirror end-state resulting from your work, so avoid that.
• Lay down prerequisite fundamentals that enable your solution. This often means a lot of tech- and team-focused type work.
• Know the success, failure, and pivot conditions of each increment.
• Enable a chain reaction. Each accomplishment ratchets your program team into a different viewpoint or perspective. “Oh, now that we have X, then Y and/or Z becomes possible.”

The downside with incremental methods is that participants and proponents develop a short-term focus if unchecked. Come up for air periodically, re-test your strategy, and give occasional time to ecosystem/portfolio thinking.

Digital strategy success fundamentals

Every digital success we’ve seen and built respected a handful of key (if underappreciated) values:

• Everyone on the value chain must win. That means defining value for everyone first, but maintain openness to unexpected value finds, too!
• Don’t add non-essential work. Getting lost in what you can do always makes things harder. Then it adds code weight and long-term expense.
• Earn the right to act. To grab an adjacent market with a digital offering, you need to reach from a position of strength. Ask and answer “what gives you that right”?
• Insight changes strategy by eliminating bad options and illuminating good ones. As stated earlier, investigation and production phases are both work, and both are valuable.
• Observe the golden ratio. Seek gains first, then savings, then earnings.

Yes, everybody thinks digital is about big launches and new earnings, but that’s only true for tech companies. In consumer and industrial, there’s a reason every business stacked adjacent services onto their recently-digitized products in the late 2010s, then turned inward in the early 2020s.

Avoid unforced errors

Avoiding problems can be as important as building newer and better. Keep the following hard-won lessons in mind as you progress:

• Build on established practices. Treating digital as a wholly different or unique competency robs you of the ability to leverage successful processes and accomplished people in the task of developing digital products and services. Most often, the combination of focused energy from outside perspective applied to the primordial goodness and value of an organization is where digital life begins.
• Be careful with “new”. Typically, digital things (projects, teams, whatevers) that don't resemble an existing organ in your business risk rejection as too foreign, too infectious, or too threatening. Even if it's not rejected outright, the introduction of something completely new will be painful. Understand what should survive and what shouldn’t.
• Don’t kill the good with the bad. Digital makes fantasy perilously easy. Your boss might think that AI chatbots will fix customer service forever but completely forget that your business’s excellent service level is its key differentiator. Your customers won’t forget that, and it’s your job on the line if that AI chatbot screws things up.
• Date the tech, don’t get married. It's tempting to reject technology decisions in favor of endless ideation, but this only works until those great ideas introduce unexpected limitations. Testing technologies throughout a digital offering’s early life yields the real lessons: what works, what doesn't, what matters, and ultimately, whether a commitment should ever happen.
• Systematize less, but create empowering system tooling. Valuable contributors can arise from unexpected places in your organization if they’re equipped to do so. It's tempting to lean heavily on outside experts and established inside leaders to drive the project forward, but a well-equipped, well-advised, customer-experienced insider can innovate circles around both if they’ve got their pulse on the target audience.
• Don’t buy your vendors unless they’re already functionally integrated. The transition from vendor to department will be slow and excruciating. The loss of accountability and hustle may be even worse!

There are always exceptions. Trouble is, you have to gamble that you’re one of them!

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Next Mile makes certain that digital strategies make sense and get implemented successfully. Our consulting on a high-risk program safeguards your digital strategy against the risks, delays, and embarrassment of failure.