Digital innovation

Over the past years there have been a lot of talk about digital innovation and transformation. If you are in the IT industry it would have been impossible to miss this and a lot of money have also been invested in technology and projects to ”digitally transform” various businesses. Recent studies indicates that the majority of digital innovation and  transformation projects fail to meet their objectives and that something is missing for organisations to reach their full digital capabilities.

This is why we decided to gather our experiences and ideas on how to successfully drive digital innovation solutions in a model that we simply named ”Digital Ready”.

The Digital Ready Model consists of four perspectives/pillars that we believe are important to cover when working for Digital Innovation solutions. These are:

1. Vision
   The vision sets the target and ”the why” for your initiative. If your digital initiative is not set out to support a digital vision, you are clearly off in the wrong direction already from the start. This is why you need to make sure that your Digital Innovation initiative/program is designed to support the corporate digital vision.
2. Change driver
   This is how you define ”the how” of your digital innovation initiative. Important things to take into consideration here are to plan for the implementation of your Digital Innovation initiative. Make sure to have a mandate for change, identify a change leader, how to communicate and cater for employee involvement in different ways.
3. Digital capabilities
   This part of the Digital Ready model covers ”the what” of your program. Which digital capabilities will this initiative bring to the organisation, which digital assets will be unlocked/made available, how will you support the organisation in using them and how will you analyze their usage?
4. Business capabilities
   This perspective is part of the Digital Ready model to put focus on the business change that will be required to gain the intended benefits of the program and make the initiative work towards the established vision. Questions that are covered are how to enable ”self service”, impact on budgets and internal financing of projects and initiatives, impact on affected parties and how to measure change & results.

Of course no change program or initiative like this would stand a chance without the proper management backing, This is why management backing also is an integral part of each of the above steps and also covered by our Digital Ready model. For each of the perspectives/pillars, we point out what kind of management backing we believe is required to be successful with your digital innovation initiative.