1    Digital Business Design

Welcome to the digital economy! If you’re reading this book, you are well aware that companies are being bombarded with digital technologies: social, mobile, analytics, cloud, the Internet of Things, all represented aptly by the acronym SMACIT (pronounced smack it to reflect how we experience this attack). SMACIT is just the beginning. Biometrics, robotics, artificial intelligence, blockchain, 3D printing, edge computing, and a steady procession of future technologies all have the potential to disrupt your business.

Digital technologies are game changing because they deliver three capabilities: ubiquitous data, unlimited connectivity, and massive processing power. These three capabilities are changing how we live and how we do business. In our personal lives, they mean we no longer sit around the dinner table and postulate how much rain falls each year in Seattle. We pull out our phones and check.

In business, ubiquitous data means we don’t guess what customers want, or who they are, or whether they are loyal. We collect data and learn the answer. Unlimited connectivity means immediate access to anything digital, eliminating bottlenecks and delays. We expect to respond immediately, even proactively, to customer problems. Finally, unlimited processing power means we can expect (and afford) systems to crunch all that ubiquitous data to detect relationships humans cannot observe.

To grasp the impact of the capabilities of digital technologies, consider how Uber disrupted an industry. Uber didn’t change customer demand for the core product—hired rides. Uber reimagined the value proposition associated with hired rides. In addition to a ride, people could know when the ride would arrive, how much it would cost, and when they would arrive at their destination. Plus, paying for (and providing feedback about) a ride became hassle-free. Taxi companies could have offered such a digital technology–inspired customer solution. They could have preempted Uber or even quickly matched Uber’s offerings (yes, even in their more regulated environment). They didn’t.

Digital technologies make it possible—and customer demands make it necessary—to solve customer problems rather than just sell a portfolio of products and services. No matter how beloved or essential their existing products, businesses must constantly enhance their customer value propositions1 to capitalize on the capabilities of digital technologies.

Some not-born-digital companies have already articulated bold visions for new value propositions inspired by the capabilities of digital technologies. For example, Schneider Electric, which traditionally sold electrical equipment, now offers intelligent energy management solutions. USAA wants not only to provide financial services to its globally dispersed members; it wants to deliver integrated solutions that ensure their financial security. Toyota still sells motor vehicles, but it also provides mobility solutions. In addition to selling pet food, Mars, Inc. wants to leverage data to make a better world for pets. These companies are disrupting their businesses in order to solve customer problems.

Digital Offerings Deliver New Value Propositions

This book is devoted to explaining how you can apply digital technologies to fundamentally change your customer value proposition. It’s worth noting that digital technologies can also have two important impacts on companies’ existing products and services.

First, the technologies themselves can enhance the customer experience. Customers want digital channels. The best digital customer experiences include intuitive, convenient apps and other digital interfaces. Digital companies also seamlessly integrate digital and non-digital interactions to enhance customer service.

Second, digital technologies make possible new and improved product features. For example, AI can add autonomous driving features to an automobile manufacturer’s core product; the Internet of Things (IoT) and analytics can improve an equipment manufacturer’s maintenance services; mobility technologies can allow people to turn on a light, start their car, or unlock a door remotely with a smartphone.

Both of these impacts on existing products and services—better customer experiences and new features—can lead to increased revenues and greater customer satisfaction. We urge you to seize the opportunities they create. But understand that these applications of digital technologies will not disrupt industries. They will raise the bar with regard to customer expectations, but they represent product and service improvements. They do not change your value proposition.

As we noted above, what makes digital technologies disruptive is the opportunity they present for new customer value propositions. These new value propositions stimulate development of digital offerings—information-enriched solutions wrapped in a seamless, personalized customer experience. Digital offerings rely on software and data to create new revenue-generating value propositions. Thus, Uber offered not just a ride, but also a solution to the uncertainties, inconveniences, and anxieties associated with navigating a busy city. In fact, Uber prompted some city-dwellers to abandon automobile ownership completely.

Digital offerings are not just for start-ups. USAA, a financial services company for members of the US military, frames the financial needs of its customers (referred to as members) in terms of their life events (buying a car, getting married, buying a house, having kids, planning retirement, being deployed). USAA applies mobile and other digital technologies to create integrated offerings that reduce the hassles and uncertainties associated with each life event. The company’s Auto-Circle integrated offering, for example, leverages USAA’s and partners’ products and services (auto insurance, auto loans, a buying service that secures low prices on new cars) to guide members through a one-stop, online, or mobile app-based car-buying experience—a delightful solution to what can be a stressful life event.2

The German car manufacturer AUDI AG is developing offerings that help customers drive an Audi car without actually owning one. For example, “Audi on demand” allows a customer to rent an Audi for a daily fee using a mobile app. For the “Audi at home” digital offering, AUDI collaborates with select luxury residences to offer a shared pool of Audi cars, conveniently parked in the properties’ garages. Residents use a mobile app to reserve those cars for personal use. Finally, “Audi shared fleet” provides companies with a virtual car fleet for their employees, who can book a car via a mobile app that charges the employer on a pay-per-use basis.3

The purpose of digital offerings like these is to foster revenue growth through new value propositions. Digital technologies can increase customer satisfaction and improve operational excellence, but companies are only dabbling with the opportunities of digital until they start to identify new value propositions.

Reimagining a company’s value proposition for the digital economy is not easy. But the bigger conundrum will be piecing together the culture, insights, and competencies that convert a successful pre-digital company into an agile, innovative digital player, capable of using software and data to deliver digital offerings.

Here is the troubling question every leadership team must ask:

Are we capable of delivering a constantly evolving, innovative set of digital offerings?

Our research over four years at nearly 200 companies suggests that for most big companies the answer to this question is no. They cannot deliver digital offerings because they are not designed for digital. That is, the interactions among their people, processes, and technology limit their ability to experiment with, learn from, discard, enhance, reconfigure, and scale up new offerings to provide new value propositions.

Our field research suggests that, in the near-term, digital offerings will represent only a small percentage of most established companies’ total revenues. That’s because the introduction of digital offerings does not immediately reduce demand for existing products and services. (Still reading paper newspapers and books? Still paying with cash or credit cards?) Companies are developing digital offerings in addition to, not instead of, traditional products and services.

Successful companies cannot afford to dump the value propositions that have made them successful—at least not yet. But they also can’t afford complacency. You need to start developing digital offerings today, not because they will elevate next quarter’s financial results (that’s unlikely), but because if you don’t start learning how digital technologies can fundamentally change the value of your current products and services, someone else will. Now is the time to start identifying and introducing value propositions driven by ubiquitous data, unlimited connectivity, and massive processing power. In other words, now is the time to design for digital.

Digital Business Design: What It Is and Why You Need It

We define digital business design as the holistic organizational configuration of people (roles, accountabilities, structures, skills), processes (workflows, routines, procedures), and technology (infrastructure, applications) to define value propositions and deliver offerings made possible by the capabilities of digital technologies.

Business design is sometimes referred to as business architecture. We are reluctant to use that term because, at many companies, architecture is seen as the IT unit’s responsibility. Right now, if you have a business architecture function, it’s probably buried in your IT organization (and having limited impact). Digital business design, in contrast, is a responsibility of senior executives in a company. It is how leaders ensure the company can execute its business strategy in a digital economy.

Business design—configuring people, processes and technology for strategy execution—isn’t new. Ever since technology became an enabler of business strategy, leaders have wrestled with the need to create synergies among these three organizational design elements. Many companies redesigned their businesses in the 1990s, as they implemented enterprise systems like enterprise resource planning (ERPs, e.g., by the German multinational software corporation SAP) and customer relationship management (CRMs, e.g., by Salesforce) to cut costs and improve the reliability and predictability of core operations. Business leaders learned that successful enterprise system implementations involved more than just new technology. They had to simultaneously introduce streamlined and standardized business processes and new roles, like process and data owners, to accomplish their objectives. The combination of new systems, disciplined processes, transparent data, and new accountabilities enabled companies like Aetna, Campbell Soup, CEMEX, DHL Express, LEGO, and USAA to reduce costs and increase the reliability of their core operations.4

Of course, business history offers up many examples of enterprise system implementations that delivered little value. Companies that failed to redesign their business processes or people’s roles as they replaced their legacy systems did not realize the desired benefits of enterprise systems.5 Companies that did not assign ownership of data to business leaders do not have reliable master and transaction data on which to perform analytics or make decisions. Companies without empowered process owners cannot seamlessly integrate acquisitions or enforce standards for new products or regions. Companies that chose to customize their ERPs to fit existing processes, rather than reengineer business processes to leverage new technology capabilities, continue to struggle with operational inefficiencies and customer dissatisfaction today.6 These companies are paying a price for not designing their business to execute their strategies.

If you struggled to design your company to effectively deploy integrated enterprise systems, brace yourself for digital value propositions. To thrill customers with innovative digital offerings, you need to go way beyond reengineering business processes; you need to rethink how you define, develop, and commercialize customer-facing offerings. You need seamless interactions between your people and automated systems so that customers experience no pain as they move from sales to service and from automated channels to human interactions. To enable that kind of seamlessness, people, processes, and technology must be designed to synchronize decisions and actions across the company.

Synchronization will not happen by accident. You’ll need to deliberately configure all three organizational design elements—people, processes, and technology—so they deliver on your new value proposition. That is the goal of digital business design.

Amazon Is Designed for Digital

One of the best examples of a company that is designed for digital is Amazon.7 It’s easy to forget that Amazon was born as an online book retailer in 1994. Like most established companies, Amazon had to reimagine its value proposition as new technologies made possible new ways of doing business. Today, Amazon is no longer a book retailer; it’s a provider of personal convenience.

Unlike most established companies, Amazon appears to absorb digital capabilities effortlessly as they become viable. For example, when browser adoption spread like wildfire, Amazon shifted from processing orders via semi-automated email exchanges, to letting customers put books in a shopping cart on a website. As adoption of mobile devices took off, Amazon seized the opportunity to create seamless transactions across mobile and web channels. As robot technology matured, Amazon redesigned its fulfillment processes using robots to find and bring items to workers filling orders. Amazon Prime capitalized on those fulfillment processes, offering a new customer value proposition and increasing company revenues.

From the start, Amazon collected detailed data on customer interactions. Amazon extended the value of that data with analytics. By identifying for customers what other customers like them tended to buy, Amazon moved beyond just selling products to helping people find what meets their needs. As machine learning became a viable technology, Amazon exploited its accumulated data to develop more sophisticated insights for the company and more value for its customers.

What is extraordinary about Amazon’s success is not simply that it has been inspired by the capabilities of digital technologies to evolve a new value proposition. The more remarkable achievement is that Amazon has almost flawlessly executed its strategy by designing its business to deliver on that evolving value proposition.

Many business and technology leaders will want to attribute Amazon’s digital success to its relatively less complex systems environment. Understandable. Unlike older successful companies, Amazon has not been building messy legacy systems for the last 50 years. But after 20-plus years of systems development, even Amazon has legacy. Its systems include workarounds and inelegant solutions. Nonetheless, there is no question that Amazon’s systems are designed for digital. The company’s CEO insisted on it. But that is only part of the story.

Consider what has made Amazon’s success possible: a well-tuned process for testing and learning customer’s reactions to new offerings, which relies on technology that delivers detailed, reliable data about customers and their desires; and people who are fully empowered to design and launch new products, services and concepts. Deft configuration—and constant redesign—of these elements has allowed Amazon to respond rapidly to new customer demands and new technology capabilities. In the process, the company has quickly recovered from (rather than avoided) failed experiments.8

Amazon provides a unique example of a company that designs the interactions of people, processes, and technology in pursuit of a digitally inspired business vision. We contend that every company aspiring to be successful in the future needs to be as deliberate in the design of its business.

The daunting challenge for companies trying to design for digital is twofold. First, the extent to which people, process, and technology interact means that any change in design triggers multiple other changes. Second, the breathtaking speed at which new technologies create opportunities for new digital offerings means that those interrelated changes occur almost constantly! Thus, digital design must be fluid. That is why it’s worth learning the art of digital design.

Digital Business Design: What It’s Not

You might think that CEOs, CIOs, and other C-suite leaders have always assumed responsibility for business design. Think again. Rather than design their companies, most business leaders structure them. They create high-level structures that relegate to lower organizational levels the responsibility for figuring out how to get things done. In other words, they divide and conquer. In doing so, they not only divide responsibility for getting work done; they divide responsibility for much of the people design (e.g., roles, skills), as well as most process and technology design. As a result, there is no organization-wide design; only organization-wide structures.

The advantage of this reliance on structure is that structures help focus the efforts of each organizational unit on delivering a manageable set of specific outcomes (e.g., profitability of a line of business). The disadvantage is that structuring invariably creates organizational silos that impede integration. Siloed organizations are characterized by their efficiencies within silos, not their effectiveness across silos. Recognizing the limitations of silos, leaders invariably introduce matrix structures to provide a single face to their customers and generate enterprise-wide consistency. Matrices can facilitate execution of standard processes for a small set of shared services. They do not however, support development of a constantly evolving set of information-enriched digital offerings.

The problem is that—given their seamlessness—digital offerings require a fast cycle of decisions and actions across functional and business line silos. As siloed companies attempt to deliver digital customer offerings, a growing number of decisions are referred up the hierarchy, discussed across silos, decided by managers far away from the operational reality, and then communicated back to where action will be taken. Digital companies cannot wait for such elongated decision-making processes. And they absolutely cannot afford the lack of synchronization in the decisions and actions of different parts of the business when they are trying to imagine, develop, market, and support digital offerings.

To better understand how to design a company to escape the constraints of business silos, it’s useful to understand what digital business design is not:

  • Digital business design is not restructuring.
  • Digital business design is not an end state.
  • Digital business design is not IT architecture.

Digital Business Design Is Not Restructuring

At many companies, an announcement of a new business strategy prompts a restructuring. The new structure reflects the company’s new priorities—and alignment of power. Leaders announce a restructuring with a fair amount of fanfare, while everyone else awaits such announcements with a fair amount of trepidation.

In digital business design, structure is just one piece of the puzzle that allows leaders to align people with strategic priorities. New roles and accountabilities increasingly supersede structure as the primary mechanisms for defining who does what and in signaling where power is located. This shift from structure to roles is a natural response to a greater need for organizational flexibility. Structure stabilizes; it cordons off resources to a particular business objective. Roles allocate individual attention to emerging—often unclear—business needs.

The new design mimics the design of digital start-ups where teams might own total responsibility for developing, marketing, enhancing, and operating key elements of a company’s digital offerings, relying on collaborative technologies and processes to coordinate their activities. In these digital businesses, all three of the design elements—people, processes and technology—are configured to consistently deliver a digital value proposition.

Digital Business Design Is Not an End State

When an architect designs a new building, the blueprints describe the completed building. And when an existing building is undergoing a total renovation, it is vacated. In contrast, when business leaders architect their company, they are designing an entity that is currently in use and constantly changing. There is no end state.

As technologies, customer demands, and strategic opportunities change, a business must adapt. The art of digital business design involves distinguishing what is relatively stable (e.g., core competencies, disciplined enterprise processes, master data structures) from those elements of the business that are expected to change regularly (e.g., digital offerings and features, team goals, apps, and people’s roles and skills). Leaders of digital businesses invest in building and maintaining the stable elements while equipping decision makers throughout the company with the data they need to make rapid decisions on anything that must necessarily change. Rather than define an end state, digital business design defines a direction and sets up a company to adapt as the future unfolds.

Digital Business Design Is Not IT Architecture

As we’ve already noted, most companies locate architecture responsibilities in their IT units. IT architecture matters. It provides a logic that guides the adoption of technology and the development of new systems and enhancements to existing systems. A well-designed IT architecture reduces technology and business risks. IT units can and should take responsibility for IT architecture design.

But the design of a digital business considers far more than technology and systems. It takes a high-level view of the interactions among people, process, and technology. The IT unit is not positioned to design people and processes. Great IT leaders can help shape a vision for digital business design, but the design of a synchronized business requires much broader management engagement.

Of course, executive teams’ plates are already full. How can they possibly add digital business design to their responsibilities? We recognize the challenge. It is why we wrote this book. Designing big, old companies for digital success involves devolving accountabilities and embracing reuse. These will not be natural management tendencies for leaders who have learned how to succeed in traditional bureaucracies. Some companies will succeed; some will fail. Our goal is to provide some guidance for your transformation that improves your odds for success.

Digital Business Transformation Is a Long Journey

Many executives in established companies feel an urgency to transform their companies to become digital. This is almost surely because technologies are enabling new value propositions that could eventually render any company’s existing value proposition irrelevant. Companies’ digital business designs must make them responsive to new possibilities and new customer demands. Realistically, however, it will take time for people—with their processes and technology—to learn how to function as a digital business. Our research has found that transformations in big companies cannot be speedy.

Digital transformations are slow because entrenched habits (i.e., culture) are hard to change. Our research suggests that leaders can best address cultural issues by adopting a series of important new behaviors, as they are needed. Rather than trying to overhaul culture, executives can gradually change specific habits. Introducing new technology and processes provides an opportunity to redesign roles and change habits—and thus eventually culture—one day at a time.

This pace of change is actually a blessing. For the foreseeable future, most companies will continue to generate the bulk of their revenues from their existing value propositions because customers usually expect existing products and services to remain available. So companies can focus first on redesigning just the part of the business that delivers new digital offerings. They can absorb those design changes more broadly as more of the company becomes digital. Thus, they can learn as they go. Royal Philips provides an example of a company navigating a transformation and learning how to succeed as a digital business.

Royal Philips: Transforming to Improve Patient Lives

Royal Philips, a company long known for innovation, has a mission to improve lives with meaningful innovation in healthcare technology.9 Philips has divested product lines that do not support this approach (e.g., audio/video, lighting) and expanded offerings related to the company’s established line of health technology, including MRI, CT and X-ray scanners, monitors, advanced clinical software, and personal devices like electric toothbrushes and sleep apnea masks.

Defining Potential Digital Offerings

Inspired by how digital technologies can enable a healthier world, Philips is now offering integrated healthcare solutions. The company has a goal of improving the lives of three billion people a year by 2025.10 As part of achieving that goal, the company is developing healthcare technology offerings that support individuals, clinicians, and healthcare organizations.

For example, in the consumer space, Philips’s uGrow solution is an app for new parents that will provide a detailed picture of how their baby is developing. Philips’s uGrow is produced from data culled from a range of connected devices, such as thermometers, scales, baby bottles, and baby monitors. The solution—a “maternity nurse in your pocket”—provides data that can also be valuable to a healthcare professional.

In the clinical space, Philips’s IntelliSpace Oncology and IntelliSpace Cardiovascular offerings integrate scientific findings with patient data (such as lab and radiology results) to provide actionable insights to inform doctors’ diagnoses. Physicians typically have little time to analyze what is often a massive amount of data when diagnosing a case. To streamline physicians’ efforts, IntelliSpace solutions apply artificial intelligence to identify important anomalies and changes in a patient’s condition (e.g., a growing tumor, a new issue with a blood vessel) and to recommend optimal therapies. Testing the new IntelliSpace algorithms on past cases revealed that, in 20 percent of the cases, doctors had recommended suboptimal treatment. Philips expects that use of these solutions will save even more lives than current approaches to medical care.

In the hospital space, Philips has developed eICU, a solution combining bedside monitors and analytics software that provides centralized, remote oversight of intensive care units. This solution helps ICU doctors and nurses prioritize urgent care cases and identify candidates for ICU release while significantly reducing workload and improving productivity.

Standardizing Enterprise Systems and Processes

To make these and other digital offerings possible, Philips embarked on a business transformation in 2011 that continues to demand senior leadership vision and commitment. Early transformation efforts focused on implementing enterprise systems to standardize three core processes: idea-to-market, for bringing a concept to market and managing the product lifecycle; market-to-order, for marketing and selling the product; and order-to-cash, for fulfilling and distributing orders, invoicing, and handling payments. These efforts have been supported by the introduction of the Philips Integrated Landscape (PIL), a technological infrastructure that has helped provide reliable transactions and data.

Philips began experimenting with using digital technologies to enhance its product offerings in late 2014. For example, Philips started using analytics and artificial intelligence to help professional caregivers interpret X-ray results. The company also developed several apps with increasing functionality to enable individuals to track results from personal devices like sleep apnea masks and electric toothbrushes.

Seeking Customer Input

Philips tested individual offerings with patients and healthcare providers to learn what they would find useful. But leaders recognized that to dramatically impact the cost and quality of healthcare, they needed to work with healthcare providers to identify game-changing solutions. Accordingly, Philips created HealthSuite Labs: stand-alone, fee-based, multi-week engagements including multi-day workshops, intended to help existing and potential healthcare clients articulate a vision and an approach for changing how they provide healthcare.

HealthSuite Lab sessions assemble cross-functional groups of leaders from Philips and a healthcare client and, in many cases, that client’s stakeholders, such as patients, insurance companies, or government leaders. Lab sessions incorporate practices from design thinking and Agile development as part of a structured methodology for co-creating prototypes of integrated solutions that will improve the way care is provided.

Building Digital Platforms

As Philips was learning what solutions would benefit key customers—and change the face of healthcare—technologists were building out HealthSuite Digital Platform (HSDP) and the Connected Digital Platforms and Propositions (CDP²) platform. These platforms are technology assets that provide repositories of data, technology, and business components (i.e., code that performs a specific activity). For every new offering, architects of these two platforms identify components that are likely to be useful for future, often unknown, offerings. They place those components in one of the repositories to facilitate reuse. Over time, Philips intends to engage with ecosystem partners who might both develop solutions and use HSDP services for their businesses. To this end, Philips has opened up HSDP to external parties via a developer portal, HSDP.io.

Changing Work

Philips’s digital vision has generated an abundance of ideas for new customer offerings, some of which digitally integrate several of Philips’s products, and all of which potentially will lead to a healthier world. To improve the odds that new offerings will fulfill its mission, Philips is redesigning the company to exploit its growing ability to create valuable solutions from components. Specifically, Philips is mapping out an organizational approach that distinguishes two business types: (1) component businesses that create reusable components for multiple solutions from (2) solution businesses that aggregate and integrate those components into solutions. At the executive team level, senior leaders direct resources to proposals that are most likely to lead to development of reusable components.

At Philips, the development of digital offerings now mirrors the iterative product development processes found in software companies rather than the product development processes found in consumer or engineering companies. Salespeople are also experiencing role changes. To sell new digital, integrated solutions they must interact with senior leaders at customer companies. They also must seek out new kinds of customers (e.g., insurance companies). In doing so, their roles have expanded to include not only educating customers on existing solutions, but also working with customers to identify potential new solutions.

How Do Companies Transform for Digital?

Digital business design aims to make a company agile so that it can create an innovative and constantly evolving portfolio of digital offerings in response to rapidly changing technologies and customer demands. As the Philips case shows, digital design involves significant changes to a company’s people, processes, and technology. We noted that these three elements interact and that the pace of change in the digital economy means that one—and therefore all—will be changing constantly. So how do you design for digital?

We have identified five building blocks (think of them as organizational capabilities) that help companies succeed digitally. These five building blocks enable companies to rapidly deliver innovative digital offerings. They incrementally transform companies that were not born-digital into digital companies by developing three interacting elements: (1) people who understand what needs to be done and how to do it, (2) processes that guide a company from idea through delivery to support digital offerings, and (3) technology that supports both efficient organizational processes and innovative digital offerings.

Figure 1.1

Five building blocks for a digital transformation

Figure 1.1 shows the five building blocks essential to digital success. We use an example from the Philips case to illustrate each building block:

The advantage of approaching digital business design as a set of building blocks is that it allows leaders to focus on specific, manageable organizational changes while implementing holistic design. This is possible because the building blocks are interdependent—making one of the building blocks stronger contributes to making the others stronger. Each building block triggers changes in people, processes, and technology in ways that make the company more agile.

Each of the building blocks requires investments of organizational resources. The companies in our research are making these investments, but they are doing so in different ways and at different times. In fact, we have no evidence of a single best template or design for your building blocks or the order in which you develop them. Indeed, our research has not found the optimal digital design. Leaders in the companies we’ve studied are making tough decisions about priorities for development of the building blocks individually and as a whole.

The next five chapters in this book detail why each building block is important and what you must do to develop it. Then, in chapter 7 we take a look at the overall digital journey. We note again that the development of the five building blocks is essential to digital success, and we show how four different companies have, in their own way, assembled their building blocks to create a digital business. In chapter 8 we discuss how companies successfully exploit the capabilities of new digital technologies, using artificial intelligence as an example. We then close the book with a list of six things companies can do to embark on a successful digital transformation.

The Call to Action

This book tells stories of a number of companies that are working aggressively to build digital building blocks and deliver digital offerings. Although we reviewed the digital efforts of nearly 200 established companies, we were not able to find many that were far along on the journey. Thus, you’ll find that we rely on a fairly small set of companies to explain how companies are building their capabilities. We believe these companies represent the state of the art in digital transformations.

Transforming to become digital is risky. Companies must deliver value propositions that demand skills they have not yet acquired, processes they have not yet embedded, and technologies they have not yet implemented. Here are the key points we suggest you keep in mind:

Perhaps some established companies will be able to sustain success without transforming to become digital. More likely, mapping out a future based on that hope is even riskier than the transformation we are describing. To minimize your risk of digital disruption, you need to design a business that can respond to unknown future technologies and customer demands. Designing your business for digital takes time. You’d better start now. We hope this book will help guide your journey.

Notes