Digital transformation or digitalization is on everyone’s lips today. Digitalization offers a wealth of products based on new technologies and technological platforms that have the ability to reshape business processes, organizational structures and working methods. It therefore has the potential to reshape entire business models or even entire market situations.
Numerous journal and research articles, books and conferences on the subject of digitalization cannot hide the fact that digitalization is still a new concept. Decision-makers are wrestling with the question of what this concept means for their department, product or company and what measures need to be taken.
As a consulting firm, we are called upon to deal intensively with the topic of digitalization. We already wrote about the results of a study in our last issue. Today, we would like to continue to present our research activities to you.
Digital Corporate Roadmapping research project
For almost all sectors of the economy, digitalization offers opportunities for conversion and redesign (e.g. data storage and processing technologies for big data analytics, web-based application platforms for implementing sophisticated cloud strategies, sensors, processing and analytics for predictive maintenance, methodologies for agile [project] management).
But how can organizations put these possibilities into practice? How can an organization appropriately enter this comprehensive topic? Which areas of the organization should the CIO focus on in specific proposals?
In our “Digital Corporate Roadmapping” research project, we want to identify the areas in which companies see the greatest need for action. From this, we want to develop an approach for the coordination and management of digitalization activities in companies, a “digital roadmap”.
We will use the results of the research project to improve and supplement our roadmapping approach, which we presented in our first digitization blog episode. The approach is primarily aimed at CIOs. It is designed to help them develop concrete options for the digitalization of their organization. It enables them to support the company in identifying new business models.
Since a “digital roadmap” is only reliable if it contains practical insights from those involved in digitization, we will conduct expert interviews – e.g. with CIOs, enterprise architects, demand managers, business developers – with companies from various industries (automotive, energy, pharmaceuticals, etc.) as part of our study. The participants will benefit in two ways:
- They receive the complete results of the research project exclusively in written form. This will give them an insight into developments on this current topic in general and in their respective industry.
- We will present the results to you in detail in a digitalization workshop and discuss the implications for your company with you.
Work on the study has already begun and the interviews will start shortly. The results are expected to be analyzed and published in March or April 2017. We hope to be able to share some of the results with you in our blog in early summer.