Digital First with Maturing Benefits
Digital First with Maturing Benefits
The digital first concept has its origins in communications theory and marketing channel choices. It has emerged as a consequence of the growth of publishing and touch point options made available via the internet. Customers whose first choice is to distribute material online (e.g. blogs, wikis, mobile apps, social media) in preference to traditional publishing channels (e.g. ink & print, even pdf’s for some digital first purists) are considered as digital first. Journalism is an example we might first think of.
However many businesses are adopting a digital first strategy as it gives them better agility, responsiveness, process efficiencies, and the ability to deliver a more tailored service plus enhanced experience to any individual customer. Bearing in mind most of us now rely on digital channels to research products and services, make purchases, and get support, having a strong digital presence makes a business visible and accessible.
It’s becoming evident that digital first is fast becoming the starting point of businesses’ later physical reality. And digital technologies are now at the centre of product and service design & delivery, as well as R&D. Not ‘just’ marketing.
Benefits can include agility in launching new revenue-generating opportunities; ability to reach new markets; provide a ‘customer of one’ service directly to the customer; streamline sales processes; improve time to value; farming of data and analytics to understand customer profiles, behaviour and preferences; readily accessible to AI; simplified and secure online purchasing; lower sale conversion costs; improved recruitment and onboarding; automate tasks and protect processes; reduce manual errors; and have real time visibility of operational and financial performance.
It’s here to stay and can only grow as a winning business strategy.
Digital first relies on computer-based technology hosting, processing, and sharing a digital representation of the business. It includes channels from company to partner & customer, and between them. Moving to digital first also requires cutover from old to new systems, process and policy changes, while still running and protecting both. This is the foundation, but companies have to start somewhere.
Alongside the benefits, a digital first approach also introduces risks and vulnerabilities. Examples are data privacy, intellectual property and revenue theft, exposure to cyber-attacks, and process degradation – where something unexpectedly other than the designed processes is happening leading to inefficiencies, illegalities, delays and increased costs.
Luckily these risks and vulnerabilities can be managed with corresponding digital first assurance software solutions from SAP designed specifically for these purposes. They allow companies built on digital platforms to operate safely. Which is another good and necessary starting point.
There are a number of these assurance solutions, we group them under functions of:
- Business assurance
- Master data governance
- Cybersecurity
- Identity & access governance
- International trade management
- Environmental, social & governance.
It allows our implementation services to prioritize around on our customer’s pain points.
But to truly scale and thrive, companies will expand and mature their use of digital first tools and frameworks. In fact it is highly likely these companies will be able to, and will actively choose to, diverge significantly from traditional hierarchical business structures that typically focus on legacy product or market lines.
In parallel, to remain safe, agile and robust, they need to also mature the use of these same SAP assurance solutions. We have long-term trusted relationships with our customers to assist them on this maturity journey, which we conceptualize in the following stages:
- Initial (safe but reactionary)
- Defined (common frameworks but still siloed)
- Managed (cross-line of business view on risk)
- Agile (embedded, automated, real-time actionable enriched assurance)
It helps our customers match resource and commercial investment with their risk exposure and appetited, as they navigate towards a highly performant, agile and resilient, innovative and efficient business that can gracefully respond to a rapidly changing financial and geo-political landscape.
This is a scalable approach to fully harvest the transformative power of technology, and take your business to your customer’s doorstep (well, keyboard).
Feel free to reach out to me (info@winterhawk.com) if you want to know more about how Winterhawk can help in this area.