Digital transformation or digitalization is a much (and hotly) debated topic these days. Digitalization not only offers a wealth of opportunities to redesign processes with new technology. Rather, it promises to completely change your company on the basis of (data-driven) business models.
But how do you deal with this wealth of possibilities? How do you define your new business models in an organized way? Do you know how your current enterprise architecture supports your business model? And what needs to be done to your enterprise architecture to enable new digital business models?
We would like to discuss these questions in this and some upcoming articles. Today we start with the “Digital Roadmap”.
The digital roadmap
Digitalization carries the risk of starting with a few quick initiatives (e.g. developing some “fancy” business applications) without looking at the big picture: Digitalization is always about business models and corporate strategy!
To take this into account, we use a four-step approach and a common text document, the “Digital Roadmap”:
- Kick-off: Scope of the project with the CIO and definition of initial strategic directions
- Analysis phase: Evaluation of the company situation (company architecture, market situation, business processes, etc.)
- Innovation phase: Collecting ideas and developing business models in idea workshops and drawing up project proposals for process improvements
- Control: Establishment of the digital roadmapping process in the company
All activities from the four steps are recorded in the “Digital Roadmap”. All meetings, workshops, etc. are collected in a schedule diagram with their (expected) results and associated implementation projects (see example below):
The “Digital Roadmap” enables you to maintain an overview of your “digital” activities, combine ideas from all areas of your company in business models and plan and manage projects that arise from these business models.