Summary: How Digital is Your Business ?

Review and Analysis of Slywotzky and Morrison's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9782806246707
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Strategia di business
• Index: Business

The must-read summary of Adrian Slywotzky and David Morrison's book: `How Digital is Your Business?: Creating the Company of the Future`.

This complete summary of the ideas from Adrian Slywotzky and David Morrison's book `How Digital is Your Business?` shows why every good business needs to fundamentally re-examine its processes in relation to digital technology. In their book, the authors explain that technology should be exploited to provide more customer information, and to get that information in real time. Additionally, technology can be used to massively increase customer choice and customisation options. This summary will teach you that creating a coherent business technology strategy will take time, but it is the best thing you can do for your company.

Added-value of this summary:
• Save time
• understand key concepts
• Expand your business knowledge

To learn more, read `How Digital is Your Business?` which demonstrates the importance of digital technology in today's business environment and why you should re-evaluate your strategy immediately.

Summary of How Digital Is Your Business? (Adrian Slywotzky and David Morrison)

1. Stop, observe, think and then get started.

Main Idea

The true objective of developing a digital business model is not to use the latest technology but to expand the organization’s strategic options and opportunities to serve customers in ways that are both better and unique.

Supporting Ideas

Historically, businesses have always tended to be run slightly inefficiently. For example:

• Guesses about future sales have dictated production volumes, meaning if the projections are wrong, companies are forced to offer rebates to make way for new stock.
• Workers have tended to be used over and over to replicate solutions to problems that have already been solved.
• As companies grow, they tend to invest more capital in distribution and support systems meaning they become less and less nimble when new products are required.

In practical terms, that meant the long-term success (or failure) of any business was dependent solely on the quality of its business design. However, in the current business environment, having a high quality business design alone isn’t enough. Long-term success will also depend on the degree of digitization achieved. Or, to put that another way, the most successful companies today have a sound business design utilizing a high degree of digitization.

Thus, developing a digital business model or digital business design is not about trying to conduct all your business online. Nor is it concerned with how many employees have computers, or how attractive your Web site is. Instead, digital business design focuses on a deeper level of effectiveness. It’s about how successfully you transform the way you do business to take advantage of all of the new options made possible by digital technologies.

Specifically, there are eight benefits that digital business models enjoy:

1. Decisions can start to be made on the basis of real-time information which is continually updated rather than guesswork.
2. The firm’s basic value proposition will become a perfect match for each customer rather than an average for the entire customer pool.
3. Customer information will flow throughout the organization in real time rather than waiting for reports to be compiled.
4. Customer service models will switch from being supplier provided to customer self-service.
5. Employees will move from working on projects that add only marginal value to new projects that maximize their talents and add much more value.
6. Internal processes will change emphasis from fixing errors to preventing errors occurring in the first place.
7. Productivity growth targets will grow from 10-percent improvements to finding fundamentally new ways of doing things resulting in 10x productivity enhancements.
8. Your business organization as a whole will shift from being a collection of separate silos into an integrated system where information, new ideas and better solutions are shared seamlessly to encourage collaboration.

Note that these shifts to a digital business model effectively represent a totally new way of doing business that is:

• Customer focused and centered.
• Using the talents of employees to maximum effect.
• Profit-focused.

And therefore, the key issue for every business is not whether or not the digital innovators and dot-coms have already staked out a strong position in your own marketplace. If you stop and observe some of them, you may note they have succeeded in digitizing business processes that are irrelevant or add only low value from the customer’s perspective.

Instead, every business should focus on developing an action plan around the answers to five key questions:

Key Thoughts

“We define a digital business as one in which strategic options have been transformed – and significantly broadened – by the use of digital technologies. Under this definition, it’s not enough to have a great Web site or a wired workforce or neat software that helps run a factory. A digital business uses digital technologies to devise entirely new value propositions for customers and for the company’s own talent; to invent new methods of creating and capturing profits; and, ultimately, to pursue the true goal of strategic differentiation: uniqueness.”

– Adrian Slywotzky and David Morrison

“Consider the people for whom you’re responsible: your customers, your employees, your partners. Within the next three years, it simply won’t be possible to do a world-class job of serving them, and the other stakeholders who rely on you, with...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Book Presentation
• Summary of How Digital Is Your Business? (Adrian Slywotzky and David Morrison)
• About the Summary Publisher
• Copyright