Top 4 things to keep in mind before starting Digital Business Model journey
A quick snapshot of the blogs published in our ‘Path to Digital Enterprise’ blog series.
Blog 1: Digital Business Model
In this blog, we have covered the importance of technology in shaping the digital business model. We have also provided a few considerations to help you to kickstart digital business model development.
You can read the first part here.
Blog 2: The S/4HANA Cloud to Enable Digital Business Model
In this blog, we have elaborated on how SAP S/4HANA Cloud can help you in providing a platform as a starting point of your Digital Business Model evaluation.
You can read the second part here.
Blog 3: How can you use technology to develop a Digital Business Model?
In this blog, we have provided an overview of the SAP BTP platform with examples of how it can be leveraged to support your digital business model development by taking advantage of cutting-edge technologies.
You can read the third part here.
In this fourth blog, we’ll talk about the most important considerations before embarking on a digital business model journey.
1. It is no longer digital transformation; it is digital acceleration
It is easy to get lost in developing platforms or applications to support new capabilities as part of this initiative. But the truth is that tech companies have invested heavily in making platforms, ecosystems, and apps that are easy to use and adopt. It is time for organizations to focus on specific use cases to differentiate themselves in the market, rather than invest in developing new solutions that already exist.
2. New Models for Digital Leadership
As the digital business progresses, the responsibility for digital initiatives will move to the C-suite. This will result in C-suites becoming more involved in making technology decisions and creating new team structures to support and implement them. To be successful, business leaders need to take more ownership of initial experiments. For this to work, technological functions will need to be built into business roles, and this change will require a new mindset and digital skill sets.
3. Measurements for Digital Success
With the current IT investments, it is becoming extremely difficult to measure the success of the initiatives and showcase the results to C-suite to get additional digital funding. With the re-engineered business process, it will still be hard to measure baseline KPIs and improvements, unless a lot of work is done at the beginning of the project phase to find measurable KPIs and are aligned with the right stakeholders.
4. An agile and iterative way of working
The digital initiative will involve cross-functional teams and implementing the changes in an iterative and continuous way will be the key to the success of the initiative. This will involve reexamining the current IT system providers’ ability to scale up on the new digital skills and co-location of the team. To support the digital goal, the sourcing strategy will change from working with a single vendor to working with several vendors who have niche/digital skills to support these initiatives.
Summary
Start with a design strategy to look at big opportunities beyond your current business model by taking advantage of new and evolving digital capabilities to generate new revenue streams.
- The foundation for this is to have a modern, robust, intelligent platform that can help in reducing your lead time to develop digital capacities. SAP S/4HANA Cloud provides you with ready to use intelligent enterprise platform to fuel your innovation at a rapid pace.
In this new business model evaluation, it is important to bring various partners and customers to develop unique capabilities to meet their requirements and co-innovate solutions with them. The SAP BTP platform gives you the ability to do this through seamless and native integration to the ERP system.
To develop a digital model, technology teams will need to be part of business functions. C-suite will need to be involved in the experimentation phase and have an Agile mindset to provide solutions at a rapid pace. This will also result in relooking at your sourcing strategies and aligning with IT partners who are nimble, adaptive, and cost-efficient.
