Good Governance Enables Digitization
Successful digitization contributes to increased value creation, productivity and innovation. The digital change process is complex and involves many resources. To ensure that your business reaches its digitization goals, it is wise to have good governance through the change journey. Digital management should be an essential means of succeeding in digitizing. Good digital management can help realize your company's digitization goals and strategies. In this article, I will elaborate on six areas that the management elements should concentrate on.
Strategy and innovation
Companies that are good at digital management are characterized by having a digital strategy in place that is linked to the company’s vision. The digital strategy should influence strategy and development work throughout the business and be integrated into the departments’ planning processes.
A good digital strategy should describe the vision, goals and purpose of digitizing your business’s services and processes. The strategy should identify digitization opportunities, risks and threats. An important element is to describe how your business can deliver services in new ways, innovate products or create new sources of revenue and growth.
An important principle in digitization is to put customers in focus. One way to achieve this is, for example, to explore new ways of interacting with customers and new ways of providing services. To achieve this, you should map out future user needs and study new technologies and digital channels that can improve customer service and user experience.
Management
It is important that digital management is incorporated into management and management processes and that top management is engaged in and supports the goals. Management should express a clear digital vision and steer it in a smooth way. Roles and responsibilities for delivering on the digital strategy should be clear. To achieve this, businesses should ensure that responsibility for digitization targets is defined, in addition to reporting on digitization KPIs and gains. To ensure a good relationship between strategy and goal achievement, make sure your employees understand what your business is being measured on (KPIs) and why it’s important to your business. For example, agile management principles can be implemented by continually asking the business why it does things, managing by value, and focusing on continuous learning and improvement. Clear priorities and quick decisions may be needed. In this way, one can more easily adapt to changing factors and needs. The best businesses utilize technology to automate and digitize reporting. In addition, they have often used digital systems for operational risk management and compliance (digital GRC) to automate and integrate risk reporting.
Customer Focus
Customer focus, customer insight and trust are essential for the success of digitization, and should therefore be a key management element. It is about putting the customer in focus and creating customer engagement. Customer experiences should be central to service development. An instrument for digital management is, for example, to ensure that future customer trends are analyzed and to define value proposition that corresponds to the business strategy. Customer needs should be proactively monitored and used to develop new customer values and new business opportunities. It is important to ensure a deep understanding of the customer across multiple dimensions, such as profitability, geography, demography, and across all channels, to achieve long-term customer engagement.
Organization and culture
It is crucial to develop an organizational culture with governance and development processes that support digitization and which is flexible to achieve growth and innovation goals. This is about the company’s digitization culture, user focus, innovation, risk willingness and willingness to change. One should strive for a smooth and adaptable organizational structure to optimize digitization throughout the organization. The structure should be adaptable to changing customer needs. For example, there may be a need for new organizational structures to adapt the business to digitization. You may want to establish strategic collaboration on digitization across departments or teams to ensure proper resource access and holistic end-to-end process focus. It is important to ensure that employees understand the possibilities of digitization for both business and users. Businesses should work proactively to ensure that all employees join the digital strategy and work actively for cultural change. An important management element is that the employees’ roles and measurement parameters (KPIs) are in line with the digital strategy and the organization’s measurement parameters (KPIs). The business should facilitate digital skills training and encourage employees to be proactive and explore how digital services can be improved at all times.
Technology and information
Is your company’s technology platforms, systems, and applications capable of supporting smooth, innovative, and efficient service development to provide easy-to-use digital services? The technology will help create, process, store, secure and exchange data to meet customer needs. For example, architecture should be designed to facilitate smooth development, as well as integrating new innovations and platforms. It is important that the IT strategy and systems are closely linked to the digital strategy, the company’s vision and strategy. Digital processes and digital tools should be optimized and controlled by the needs of the users. A key management element is to secure and understand how good your business is to protect information and reputation against the threats in the digital world. A framework for information management and data processing should be established. Integration of comprehensive risk management in the business that includes digital risk management with defined risk management processes, digital value evaluation, information protection, data and cyber security should also be established.
Operating model and processes
Once the company’s digital state has been mapped and the strategy for digitization is well integrated into all business plans and in business development, digital guidelines, procedures and activities can be developed. The operating model should address resources, access to technology, competence, procedures, processes and measurement. The goal is that the digitization work is well integrated into the company’s daily operations, and is continuously updated and improved. In order to ensure good governance, it is important that value-creating processes are mapped and defined. A goal should be to achieve streamlined and efficient internal processes that are maximized by new digital ways of working and supported by digital technology. In order to drive development forward, companies should adopt flexible and dynamic development methods in their work on digital services, such as agile and lean. Agile processes and systems enable rapid response to changes in the market. If one is to succeed one should have a culture that gives room to fail and learn from it. In order to ensure good governance, resources should be managed in the best possible way and one should facilitate good cooperation internally and with third parties. The competence development in the business should also support the digital strategy and anticipate future competence needs. One example is change competence, ie the ability at individual and group level to live well with rapid changes in technology, organization and skills. The management should also show curiosity and willingness to learn in addition to prioritizing time and resources for the employees.
Summary
If your business succeeds in ensuring good digital management within the six areas above, the business will be better equipped to realize its digital vision and strategy. The digital maturity will increase with the maturity of digital management, and the business can ensure higher value creation and goal achievement. The Transcendent Group has skilled and experienced senior consultants in the field of Digital Governance and we are happy to have a non-binding conversation with you about this topic.
