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CEOs favour ‘bolt-on’ digital strategies over digital ‘transformation’, says Forrester study
« In its the State of Digital Business 2014 report, which polled 1,591 senior business leaders in the UK and US during November 2013 to January 2014, Forrester revealed some major disconnects between the marketing and technology sides of businesses, with responses signalling a “digital strategy execution crisis”. «
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Yet despite their involvement, few CEOs set a clear vision for digital. In firms with more than 250 employees, just 21 per cent of CEOs set a clear vision for digital
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A Bolt-On Digital strategy will Not Be enough In 2015 and beyond:While marketing has been the principal driver of digital initiatives up to 2014, going forward firms must take a more comprehensive approach to digital transformation
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CMOs Must Partner with CIOs To Transform Toward a Digital Business: Digital business requires both digital customer experience and digital operational excellence
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CIOs must embrace digital as a core technology imperative: CIOs must shift their focus toward systems that support the firm’s ability to win, serve, and retain customers
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« As part of a Q&A session at the American Enterprise Institute, Bill Gates talked about how public policy can help workers, particularly in jobs subject to greater automation, better cope with technological change. Gates favors (a) taxing consumption rather than labor, and (b) subsidizing work rather than a wage floor through a higher minimum wage. «
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Technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of skill set… 20 years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don’t think people have that in their mental model
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The Economist earlier this year predicted that high-paying jobs such as accountants, real estate sales agents and commercial pilots would all lose their jobs to software within the next 20 years
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[Bill Gates] thinks tax structures will have to move away from taxing payroll
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force us to rethink how these tax structures work in order to maximize employment given that capitalism in general over time will create more inequality, and technology over time will reduce demand for jobs, particularly at the lower end of the skill set
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Your Happy Employees Are Still Job Hunting (Infographic)
« Salary.com surveyed of more than 1,200 people about their current jobs and whether they plan to search for a new job this year. They found that 83% of people surveyed said they will look for a new job in 2014, which is up 6% from last year. »
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Three percent want More recognition.
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Ten percent want Better work-life balance.
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Nine percent want A new boss.
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Eight percent want Clearer goals.
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Five percent want Flexible scheduling.
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Four percent want Better benefits.
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Five Steps To Starting Your Digital Transformation Initiative
« Over the past 12 months, Constellation has interviewed, researched, or assisted more than 50 market leaders and fast followers crafting a digital transformation strategy. Regardless of industry, size of company, or geography, these early adopters share five common steps to success. In each case, these steps provide the foundation to not only transforming their business models, but also reinventing their brand promise. These five steps include (see Figure 1): »
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Designing new experiences and business models. Use digital as an opportunity to craft new experiences. Customers seek outcomes and experiences while organizations continue to sell products and services.
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Developing a culture of digital DNA. Success begins at the top. Digital DNA requires strong leaders who are not afraid of dips in share price, cannibalizing existing markets, and identifying new approaches. Organizations must also assess their innate ability to thrive in a digital business environment and nurture digital artisans.
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pplying new technologies to existing infrastructure. Digital does not mean wholesale replacement of existing technologies. Digital does not mean just putting a mobile front end or adding a social collaboration feature to a process. The convergence of mobile, social, cloud, analytics (big data), and unified communications provide starting points.
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Moving from gut to data driven decisions. Data is the heart of digital transformation. Every touch point, every click, every interaction provides a digital exhaust rich in context. The goal is to move from right time information overload, to real-time contextual relevancy.
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Co-creating and co-innovating with new partners. No company can succeed on their own. In digital transformation, an ecosystem of co-creation and co-innovation awaits.
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Translate analog businesses into digital businesses. The effort will require more than adopting the five pillars of digital convergence, but a rethink of the core business model
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Manage a world of trust and radical transparency. Success will require more than fluffy statements about open leadership.
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Develop an authentic business brand. An organization must start by asking itself what the company would be like if it were a person.
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Disrupt business models with digital technologies. Keep in mind, technologies will come and go
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Work with five generations of digital proficiency. Focus in on how to enable the different generations for digital proficiency
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The seven habits of highly effective digital enterprises
« To stay competitive, companies must stop experimenting with digital and commit to transforming themselves into full digital businesses. Here are seven habits that successful digital enterprises share. »
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1. Be unreasonably aspirational
Leadership teams must be prepared to think quite differently about how a digital business operates. Digital leaders set aspirations that, on the surface, seem unreasonable. Being “unreasonable” is a way to jar an organization into seeing digital as a business that creates value, not as a channel that drives activities.
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2. Acquire capabilities
The skills required for digital transformation probably can’t be groomed entirely from within. Leadership teams must be realistic about the collective ability of their existing workforce. Leading companies frequently look to other industries to attract digital talent, because they understand that emphasizing skills over experience when hiring new talent is vital to success, at least in the early stages of transformation. The best people in digital product management or user-experience design may not work in your industry. Hire them anyway.
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3. ‘Ring fence’ and cultivate talent
A bank or retailer that acquires a five-person mobile-development firm and places it in the middle of its existing web operations is more likely to lose the team than to assimilate it. Digital talent must be nurtured differently, with its own working patterns, sandbox, and tools.
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4. Challenge everything
The leaders of incumbent companies must aggressively challenge the status quo rather than accepting historical norms. Look at how everything is done, including the products and services you offer and the market segments you address, and ask “Why?”
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5. Be quick and data driven
Rapid decision making is critical in a dynamic digital environment. Twelve-month product-release cycles are a relic. Organizations need to move to a cycle of continuous delivery and improvement, adopting methods such as agile development and “live beta,” supported by big data analytics, to increase the pace of innovation. Continuous improvement requires continuous experimentation, along with a process for quickly responding to bits of information.
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6. Follow the money
Many organizations focus their digital investments on customer-facing solutions. But they can extract just as much value, if not more, from investing in back-office functions that drive operational efficiencies. A digital transformation is more than just finding new revenue streams; it’s also about creating value by reducing the costs of doing business.
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7. Be obsessed with the customer
Rising customer expectations continue to push businesses to improve the customer experience across all channels. Excellence in one channel is no longer sufficient; customers expect the same frictionless experience in a retail store as they do when shopping online, and vice versa. Moreover, they are less accepting of bad experiences; one survey found that 89 percent of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience. On the flip side, 86 percent said they were willing to pay more for a better customer experience.1
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Strategic principles for competing in the digital age
« Digitization is rewriting the rules of competition, with incumbent companies most at risk of being left behind. Here are six critical decisions CEOs must make to address the strategic challenge posed by the digital revolution. »
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Enhancing interactions among customers, suppliers, stakeholders, and employees.
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Improving management decisions as algorithms crunch big data from social technologies or the Internet of Things
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Enabling new business or operating models, such as peer-to-peer product innovation or customer service.
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Decision 1: Buy or sell businesses in your portfolio?
The growth and profitability of some businesses become less attractive in a digital world, and the capabilities needed to compete change as well. Consequently, the portfolio of businesses within a company may have to be altered if it is to achieve its desired financial profile or to assemble needed talent and systems.
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Decision 2: Lead your customers or follow them?
Incumbents too have opportunities for launching disruptive strategies. One European real-estate brokerage group, with a large, exclusively controlled share of the listings market, decided to act before digital rivals moved into its space. It set up a web-based platform open to all brokers (many of them competitors) and has now become the leading national marketplace
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Decision 3: Cooperate or compete with new attackers?
A large incumbent in an industry that’s undergoing digital disruption can feel like a whale attacked by piranhas. While in the past, there may have been one or two new entrants entering your space, there may be dozens now—each causing pain, with none individually fatal. PayPal, for example, is taking slices of payment businesses, and Amazon is eating into small-business lending. Companies can neutralize attacks by rapidly building copycat propositions or even acquiring attackers. However, it’s not feasible to defend all fronts simultaneously, so cooperation with some attackers can make more sense than competing.
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Decision 4: Diversify or double down on digital initiatives?
As digital opportunities and challenges proliferate, deciding where to place new bets is a growing headache for leaders. Diversification reduces risks, so many companies are tempted to let a thousand flowers bloom. But often these small initiatives, however innovative, don’t get enough funding to endure or are easily replicated by competitors. One answer is to think like a private-equity fund, seeding multiple initiatives but being disciplined enough to kill off those that don’t quickly gain momentum and to bankroll those with genuinely disruptive potential
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Decision 5: Keep digital businesses separate or integrate them with current nondigital ones?
Integrating digital operations directly into physical businesses can create additional value—for example, by providing multichannel capabilities for customers or by helping companies share infrastructure, such as supply-chain networks. However, it can be hard to attract and retain digital talent in a traditional culture, and turf wars between the leaders of the digital and the main business are commonplace.
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Decision 6: Delegate or own the digital agenda?
Advancing the digital agenda takes lots of senior-management time and attention. Customer behavior and competitive situations are evolving quickly, and an effective digital strategy calls for extensive cross-functional orchestration that may require CEO involvement.
Découvrez le livre que nous avons co-écrit avec 7 autres experts avec pleins de retours d'expérience pour aider managers et dirigeants