Best Practices Of Digitally Born Companies
Enterprises today are undergoing major technology transformations, in the way they do and conduct their businesses. The Digital shift is forcing non-technology companies, to adopt several best practices to catch on to this transformation, there by becoming more nimble, efficient and geared to operate in the dynamic future. There are the original ‘Born Digital’ companies, which started out recently, never had to operate in the old era, and were immersed to adopt the newer styles of doing business from their very inception. As per Gartner, Born-digital enterprises are “a generation of organizations founded after 1995, whose operating models and capabilities are based on exploiting internet-era information and digital technologies as a core competency.” These companies have adopted several practices which can now be leverage by traditional enterprises to help them make their inevitable shift toward the digital transformation journey easier. Conventional companies can replicate certain aspects of born-digital companies, particularly in three key areas: Business, Risk mitigations and People.
Processes
Operating Model: Born Digital companies have flexibility in their operating models. Conventional companies must learn to change their older models to more nimble, flexible ones for faster access to markets serving their customers better. Some of them can try a few models and end up with a blended one.
Your users: It is imperative to always focus on the users (customers) and making their experience near perfect. Relentless focus on the end user seems to succeed in the winner-take-all digital world.
Operations: Businesses operations and IT systems must now reflect all phases and elements within the customer journey—not just the exact moment of purchase a customer did. And the experience must be continually updated as feedback to their platform, to make their experience and journey even better.
Risk Mitigations
Decision Making: Traditional businesses usually make or take decisions based on gut feelings, but born-digital businesses must use every tool and all data to guide the decisions. Collection of data at every single point is essential, and only with data and proper reporting, decisions should be taken to grow the business.
IT Platforms: Enterprises need to maintain core transactional processes and systems, whether they are accounts payable and receivable, order management, procurement, or something else. And they must also make sure those business processes and technologies remain efficient. But now, they must reflect all phases of and elements within the customer journey—not just the exact moment of purchase. And this experience must be continually updated.
Data First: Born Digital companies take business decisions based on ‘their data’. It is important to take risks, measure all key metrics, and plan carefully before building newer systems or planning for growth.
People Hiring: Digital companies are comfortable hiring fewer people if those hires are of a higher caliber. Now, Smaller teams must deliver higher performances and diversity to increase creativity. One must be able to just invest a lot of money in a handful of people, versus an average amount in a larger number of people.
Lean: The number of employees no longer reflects the success of the company. When you scale up your businesses, adding people may add bureaucracy. Investing in newer software, machine learning techniques, to improve efficiency would be better than mapping requirements to actual headcount. It’s about maintaining speed and agility.
Dependencies: Teams would no longer have to wait for sign-offs, handoffs, and preparation of test environments. These tasks would be managed within the team, with immediate input from development and operations specialists. Such freedom could help development teams reduce their release times from months to hours.
Companies must now stay competitive in a world, where providing great customer experience has become most critical. In nearly every industry, they must continually innovate digital products and services, as well as the business processes that support those products and services. They can gain greater agility if they abandon rigid management practices of the past and adopt a new approach that enables evolution, adopting change quickly, and incorporating the latest and greatest functionality and best practices to stay relevant and move towards digital transformation.