The case for a digital strategy.
Have you ever seen those stories on LinkedIn or other social media sites where a competitor in your industry is joint ventured with a tech company streamlining a business process? And now they’re selling that process technology as an application to your industry?
Like others, I’m sure you thought, “Why didn’t I think of that?” and “How could I have missed this?” You may even be interested in using the application for your own business because it’s a bright idea and could help your organization. The process of finding improvement within your organization that technology can impact, measuring those results, and packaging it to sell to your industry is becoming more and more popular. When you hear “All companies are tech companies,” it means it’s not just about your organization using technology to do business, but now creating technology unique to your industry as a new source of revenue and profit. Finding incremental innovation opportunities can empower not just your team but be digital transformation, providing whole new opportunities in your industry marketplace.
How to get started with building a digital strategy.
If you have experienced the scenario above, you might be asking yourself what is next and how do I get started? It can be challenging to think of new ideas in a busy workday as day-to-day tasks prioritize over creative work. We found at solut that a more structured and formal process helps us think about these new ideas. We have a variety of tools to assist with idea generation. We have our Digital Maturity Assessment, where it reviews the core processes involved in your business. The assessment is a facilitated conversation about what pieces of the organization need improvement tomorrow and identifies possible new technology to assist in this improvement. Sometimes this means customized applications that then can be productized and potentially sold within your industry. Another tool that we use is our innovation workshops. This is where we sit down with three to four people within your company or three to four different organizations within your industry and review possible innovation opportunities. Workshops typically start with reviewing what innovation is and how we’ve deployed it within our company. Workshops include session time to review opportunities.
We build a template version of the workshop to be deployed through Microsoft Teams to create a company culture of innovation and gather new ideas that could impact it. In workshops, we also review how to qualify if it is an idea worth moving forward with. We like to ensure a substantial ROI and value delivered before moving forward with an idea. A third option we have for generating innovative ideas is through our innovation surveys. Typically they occur after a digital maturity assessment where we’ve already identified possible areas for improvement, but they’re less apparent. For example, if there are many paper processes in your organization, we wouldn’t know which one to tackle first. A survey would ask people who work with those paper processes to identify the manual work, asking how they believe it could be automated and its impact. These generate new ideas that we may not have thought of going through a typical workshop or just having the digital maturity assessment. After these surveys, we go through a qualifying process to determine how much value each idea would have to your organization. Once ideas are qualified, we then move to a costing exercise, seeing what it would take to build the technology to support the idea. This is where we can get creative with billing strategies, where it could look like some of the joint venture work that you see shared on LinkedIn or other ways to potentially share your idea’s success. Of course, if you want to just have the technology yourself, traditional costing and billing are always options.
Yes, this is a simplified version of the process; however, at solut, we have an entire division dedicated to innovation and identifying opportunities to make process improvements through technology. The value that we offer is a guided and structured approach so that you use your time wisely. Suppose you have an idea ready to go. In that case, we would be happy to evaluate it. If you need a hand identifying ideas, we are equally excited to guide you through the process. Get in touch, and let’s discuss.