Caxy Digital Strategy Process: How to make choices about where and how to win with technology

Growing companies have clear corporate strategy. They decided how they want to win by answering 5 questions:

• What is your winning aspiration?
• Where will you play?
• How will you win?
• What capabilities must be in place?
• What management systems are required?

Companies need to have crisp answers to these business strategy questions. But Digital Strategy needs to answer a different set of questions.

And most companies today find that nearly all their company initiatives have a technology component. They realize they need a technology strategy that supports and helps drive the corporate strategy.

The trouble is they most companies end up with a list of todos, none of which have explicit ties back to a strategic objective. They don’t have a solid way to determine what is worth doing and in what order to do it.

How is Digital Strategy different from Company Strategy?

Digital Strategy is how a company uses technology to execute and advance business strategy goals. It creates a plan to maximize the benefits of technology and data for the greatest impact.

When creating a digital strategy for a new client, we start with creating a vision and a desired outcome. This will form the basis for the strategy roadmap. Looking at the current state of processes, systems and solutions will allow us to map out the necessary steps to reach our desired outcome. What can be kept? What needs to be improved or created? What are the priorities? The answers to these questions will be key to creating a digital strategy.

• Operations - internal and external communications, data access and management, customer service - how will these be affected?
• Investment - What steps will be taken to ensure the greatest return?
• Customers - Is there an opportunity to expand your target audience?
  

New questions to ask

Digital Strategy has its own set of questions that Caxy can answer through our process:

• Does digital technology change the businesses you should be in? Could digital technology help you expand your company’s boundaries in the value chain downstream or upstream of your current business?
• How could digital technology improve the way you add value to the businesses you are in? How would it help your businesses be more competitive?
• Could digital technology change your target customer? Is it opening up more potential targets?
• Does digital technology affect the value proposition to your target customer? Can it have the effect of increasing demand for your product or service?
• How can digital technology enhance the enterprise capabilities that differentiate you from your competition? This is not about adding digital capabilities, but about adding digital to your capabilities.

The risks of not having a Digital Strategy

70% of all Digital Transformation initiatives do not reach their goals.

Of the $1.3 trillion that was spent on Digital Transformation last year, it was estimated that $900 billion went to waste.

Caxy’s Digital Strategy Process will give companies a way to say “no” to the wrong initiatives and give them the data and confidence to create a technology roadmap that organizes the right initiatives into the right order and ties each to a strategic objective that supports the overall business strategy.

Companies should be able to look at a technology roadmap and know why each exists, what outcome it drives in the business, and how it will be measured.

Caxy can create a strategy and then a plan to support and drive it

The Caxy process

Caxy’s process includes:

• 2-day workshop with leaders to get refined answers to the 5 strategic questions, especially as they relate to the business strategy
• The 2-day will spin off questions that need research. Caxy will follow up with a combination of independent research (market, customer, other) along with internal research (status of current platforms, people and product maturity, gap analysis)
• We will reconvene in a ½ day session to go over findings and recommendations and roadmap and get input from the team to finalize the Digital Strategy

As an additional service:

• Caxy can typically either find products to fit the roadmap, hire partners, or do the work ourselves. We will help in creating or getting estimates and proposals from providers
• Caxy can meet quarterly to go over the strategy and progress from the internal and external teams

Caxy Interactive is a Custom Software Development Company

See what other services Caxy has to offer.