Transforming the business model - from analog to digital

Most consumer-facing businesses are now using digital tools to get closer to customers. Far fewer are close to completing the challenging but essential journey to a holistic, integrated model, with shared assets and platforms, and an overarching digital approach.

For most of these same companies, the focus over the last decade has been on globalizing the business model and its constituent processes and services, from finance to HR to supply chain management. Migrating from local to regional to global models, they’ve reaped big benefits in operational efficiency and scale.

Now the stage is set for a major convergence, whereby the globalized business model meets a digitized, increasingly customer-connected value chain. Instead of treating new digital efforts as isolated projects, companies have begun working toward a holistic, integrated global digital business model, with shared digital assets and platforms and an overarching digital approach that clearly supports the business strategy.

While the journey to a digital business model will vary by sector and company, there are important commonalities as well. No matter what business you’re in, managing multiple platforms, negotiating with numerous software vendors and dealing with compatibility issues will consume time, money and energy. Hence, those companies that effectively embed digitization into their business model view all processes as being candidates for digitization and enable the fast deployment of solutions at scale will have a key competitive advantage. Businesses looking to gain this advantage will need to clearly define how they will innovate, implement, manage and monitor the application of digital solutions throughout the organization—a significant change from working on separate solutions in various parts of the business.