How Can Different Business Models be Successfully Digitized?
Developing a digital business model is a must. A recent business model from giant tech companies (that has been used for hiring) can be applied to your business.
Digitization isn’t a new concept in the world. It might not have existed for centuries but has undoubtedly been in the picture to help us realise how wonderful as an opportunity it can be. As customers, we’ve loved digitization. Be it looking for things on our favorite ecommerce store or comparing prices and coming to a purchase decision. There are more than a few advantages for an average customer in knowing brands and buying themselves time by ordering everything online.
More than that, just like a brick and mortar store, websites now even show personalised recommendations specific to your needs. The best part is that more and more companies with each passing day are catering to these needs. Life for the customer couldn’t have been better!
As much as we enjoy all these facilities as customers, it is a different scenario as we step into an enterprise’s shoes. A majority of businesses today are finding it much difficult to reinvent their processes and sail with the wave of digitisation. There are many reasons for this.
One of the main is that these businesses see the advancement in technology as the driver of the digital revolution. They fail to formulate a strategy around these new technologies. Even if they do, the pace is much slower than the real changes taking place in the market. Similarly, a significant number of companies are failing to see changing customer behaviors and expectations. As a result, they fail to discover that digitisation is a result of changing customer behaviors rather than technologies.
Digitisation must appear as one big radical revolution that has shaken the core of the industries. But instead, it is a series of micro revolutions that are taking place every 12 to 18 months. The sooner the businesses realise this fact, the faster they will be able to keep up the pace with it. The real challenge comes, however, in resource allocation. Most businesses exhaust their budgets by increasing the productivity and efficiency of their organisations. As a result, they fail to formulate a strategy for the digital revolution. The realisation might not come instantly, but ignoring customer demands, continuing to do business the usual way and sidelining the digital revolution will lead them to nothing but the road to extinction.
However, the change towards accepting the digital revolution and doing something about it has to start from the leadership position in an organisation. A Harvard Business Review Research report reveals one-third of the businesses believe that their CEOs lead digital transformation efforts. Unless entrepreneurs themselves aren’t aware of the impact of the digital wave, it is more than challenging for employees to extract anything out of it.
The CEO of Accenture, Pierre Nanterme, points out that the digital revolution is the main reason why more than half of the Fortune 500 companies have disappeared since the year 2000. And it isn’t surprising.
If you take a look at the top 10 companies in the world today, we see Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, AT & T, Samsung, Facebook, etc. However, the same picture a decade back was entirely different, where companies like Coca Cola, Citi, Hewlett Packard, among others made it to the list. Walmart and Microsoft are two of the key companies that have still managed to be visible in both rankings. Anyone can figure out the difference lies in adapting to the trends of digitidation.
What is the wave of digitisation?
Digitisation or digital transformation as we know it, is a continuous and rigorous change of functionalities to the digital medium and platforms. It is based on a sophisticated IT infrastructure, digital applications, and optimally networked systems along with data. For new entrants, this might seem like a new area of business, which is the new normal now. But those who have sustained for a while in the market understand the pain behind shifting traditional business processes to digital platforms. While some existing products can be easily mapped as digital products, others have to be considered thought upon and build a new process around.
The digital revolution also leads to the fusion of online and offline processes, ultimately disrupting technologies and radically changing industries. Its benefits can be understood in terms of automation, optimisation, the autonomy of processes, flexibility in operations, individuality of products and services, higher customer satisfaction, among others.
It wouldn’t be incorrect to say that digitisation leads to innovative business processes and digital products. Be it customer expectations or more than the ever fierce market competition; digitisation is here to stay as a long term business trend.
Underlying Criteria for Digitisation
Companies that want to make digitisation successful must fulfill a few prerequisites to trigger the process. These requirements are also the concrete pillars or components of a successful digital process.
- Developing a digital strategy: The starting point of digitally transforming a business is developing a strategy around it. It includes the digital transformation of the business core and developing new business segments.
- Formulating a digital organisation: Building a digital revolution isn’t one man’s task, nor can it be accomplished in a single day. Instead, it is a total of evolution, revolution and digital unit.
- Building a digital business model: The foundation of the digital business model is laid upon an efficient digital strategy. Companies must take the assistance of modern methods to analyse challenges and problems, create ideas and come up with excellent solutions to addressing an issue. Start by brainstorming ideas, experimenting and learning from them.
- Developing agile methods: Methodological competence is the foundation stone of any digital organization. To avoid any failure of ideas at the operation level, they must be agile. Agile methods are needed to meet challenges as well as Java software development and implement business models.
- Establishing a robust IT infrastructure: To deploy agile methods in real-time markets, an organization must have a robust IT infrastructure. It supports flexibility in the digital process and serves as an advantage to the organization.
Conclusion: Digitisation for Different Business Sectors
With the prerequisites at hand, digital transformation can take place for any organisation across industries. One hand, in the management sector digitisation, can full-proof solutions, flexibility react to market changes, drive higher ROI, and maintain a competitive edge. On the other hand, in marketing, it can help analyse results, target better, reduce spends, increase operating range, etc. Similarly, for sales digitisation can automate support and ensure smoother onboarding while for the production dept., it can automate processes, improve the allocation of products, etc. Ultimately it changes the markets in a fundamental way, where adapting is the only option for businesses.