Digital Disruption
As all-things-digital becomes almost the de-facto starting point for any business strategy these days, irrespective of whether your business is based around digital products or services or not, it becomes increasingly important to find a way through to dealing with the so-called age of digital disruption. It really is starting to get to the stage of either finding a way to disrupt or being disrupted.
Digital disruption is having an impact on businesses across nearly all industry sectors and business sizes. If you are a start-up, digital and technology are givens in any business planning process – from websites to social media to mailing lists to the cloud to customer management – they can all be planned and researched to ensure they play an integral part in the start-up process.
However, what can established businesses do to integrate existing businesses processes into the advantages offered by business technology? The starting point needs to be finding out how your business currently operates by discussing and understanding those operations around a business model. The challenge is that this model must be as simple, relevant, and understandable as possible, while not oversimplifying the complexities of how a business has been operating and surviving with limited or no digital integration. And voilà, a business technology strategy is born!
Business Technology Strategy
The aim of bringing digital into the business mix is to ensure that it contributes to making it easier for you to run your business and increase sales and profits. Any business is based around building blocks covering areas such as customers, products/services, infrastructure/operations and finance to provide a representation of the business:
- Customers: An organization serves one or several Customer Types (segments).
- Products/Services: The organisation aims to solve customer problems and satisfy customer needs with value propositions.
- Channels: Products and services are delivered to customers through various channels (for communication, distribution and sales)
- Customer Relationships: These are created, managed and maintained for each customer type.
- Revenue Streams: These result from successfully delivering your products and services to your customers via your channels.
- Key Resources: These are the people, materials etc required to create, offer and deliver items 1-4.
- Key Activities: The activities performed by the resources.
- Key Partnerships: External resources and activities which contribute to the business revenue streams.
- Cost Structure: This is the result of analysing the business model elements.
(Adapted from Strategyzer Business Modelling – find out more at http://www.businessmodelgeneration.com/ or check out the book “Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers” including a free first “View Inside” chapter on Amazon)
Big brands such as Amazon, Uber and AirBnB are the flagships of digital disruption, innovating and disrupting their own market sectors and beyond. However, TallGuyDigital can help small businesses look at how they too can innovate in order to respond to digital and take advantage of new business models, mainly based around “Software as a Service” and “the Cloud”.
Tall Guy Digital provides a very simple entry point to this wonderful, albeit sometimes confusing and overwhelming, world of digital technology. To find out more, read how Tall Guy Digital can help you ‘Get Your Shlists Together‘ by requesting your free guide to using your contact lists to gain more business
