customers and the customers themselves reduce their costs.
Additionally, it turns out that one company can serve, let’s say, not five customers for $1 million a month, but five hundred for $20 million a month. Moreover, this is one of the key areas of digital economy development.
Business Digital Competence
What kind of digital pathways can business do? What can be digitized for digital transformation?
The Boston Consulting Group introduced a matrix of competencies that companies need to become digital. It includes 6 areas:
– digital business;
– digital marketing;
– digital products;
– Digital Analytics;
– digital manufacturing (industry 4.0);
– new ways of working.
Let’s take a closer look at what these are and what kind of people they need.
Digital business
This is a strategic function, which was previously handled by the Director of development, but now the focus is moving to numbers, and 3 more areas have appeared:
– digitalization and business transformation;
– digital venture investments;
– digital laboratory.
Digitalization of business is a change in the business model and the introduction of technologies into the company’s processes. As a result, operating losses should decrease, and business profitability and revenue should increase.
Digital venture investments – search for new business niches and promising start-ups to invest in. Accordingly, the quality of investments in these niches is assessed.
The digital laboratory creates promising partnerships and organizes a factory of pilot projects. The indicators are the number and success of the pilot projects launched.
Within the direction of digitalization and business transformation, the following directions can be distinguished:
– IT infrastructure and its optimization;
– production, including maintenance and repairs, industrial safety, operational analytics, automation of reporting, etc.;
– logistics and logistics;
– organizational efficiency and record keeping;
– sales and current products/services, i.e. customer service;
– economics and finance, including accounting;
– frames.
Required roles in the digital transformation team
The following list is not a record in the employment record, but a list of the roles to be performed.
– CDTO (Chief Digital Transformation Officer, or Head of Digital Transformation).
The main ideologist, who chooses the goals and direction of the movement, agrees the budget and manages the implementation of the transformation, coordinating all projects, interacting with external parties and inspiring his team.
– CA (Chief Architector, or Chief Architect).
It is responsible for the practical implementation of transformation in the form of connecting all components: business processes, applications, data warehouses, interfaces of interaction. It is not desirable for one person to combine the roles of chief architect and project manager, as their roles and responsibilities in the project are very different. The project manager is primarily the manager and the chief architect is the technician.
– CDO (Chief Data Officer, or Data Manager).
Responsible for the timely provision of the necessary data and analytics, coordinates their collection, storage and processing, forms a data processing unit.
– CTO (Chief Transformation Officer, or Digital Design and Process Manager).
Responsible for the implementation of the process approach and the design of new digital services, the study of processes, needs and customers.
Also important:
– lawyer (monitors changes, innovations and nuances of legislation, especially in the field of intellectual and data rights);
– Specialist for Interaction with External Organizations (contacts with data owners used in the project);
– information security specialist (responsible for data protection, which inevitably attract increased interest immediately after informing the external environment). In general, you should not neglect information security. As soon as you become visible on the market, there are people who want to get your data. However, do not close, because most of your data loses its value with the speed of fading banana from the store.
At the same time, it is necessary to understand that the current CIO (the head of the IT direction) is not suitable for the post of CDTO. Or it will need a long-term overhaul of its thinking and work priorities. We will address this issue in more detail in one of the following chapters.
Digital marketing
This is a function for generating digital content and managing end-to-end communication through digital channels. The main tasks are:
– the production of digital content;
– brand management in digital space and communication channels (messengers, social networks, email, etc.);
– Interact with users to collect feedback and learn preferences;
– launch of advertising campaigns.
The main roles here are:
– SMM specialist;
– MarTech specialist;
– Target Analyst;
– SEO specialist.
SMM-specialist is engaged in the promotion of business on the platforms of user content, i.e. in social networks, blogs, on educational platforms and in the framework of advertising campaigns.
MarTech specialist manages digital marketing technologies, i.e., tools that help plan, implement and automate the marketing activity of the company, measure its results and ensure continuous interaction with the audience. Now there are many tools that allow marketers to work with data and digitize routine processes.
The target scientist works with the target audience through targeted advertising.
The SEO specialist is responsible for transferring the traffic of Internet users to your resources (sites, applications).
Digital products
It’s about creating new digital products in the form of analytics services, applications.
How digital products differ from «classic»:
• communication between the user and the seller is direct, through digital channels;
• The processes involved in providing the service use modern tools – digital platforms, chat bots, machine learning, big data and the like.
The following key roles are required in this area.
1. Product Manager / Product Owner (more correctly «Product Manager») is an entrepreneur within the company who manages the product, forms requirements for it, negotiates with partners, manages its profit. It’s a key role for a digital product.
The product manager must have the following skills.
– Knowledge of psychology, market laws and subject matter
In order to create something, you need to understand the market and see its trends. This gives the ability to generate ideas and form hypotheses from