About The Author
Andy Frank is our Founder and CEO. Since founding UDig, he has had the opportunity to build a business fueled by finding clients the right technology solutions to solve their business challenges.
Digital Defined
By Andy Frank
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What if Digital has less to do with the technology your business uses and more to do with how people interact with your business?
The fact is consumer expectations are changing. In your business, outside your business and beyond your industry. All of which impact how consumers perceive your brand. The term ‘Digital’ has been broadly used over the past 5 years to describe business and technical initiatives to modernize the customer experience. But, what does it really mean today?
What started originally as purely technology enablement to put more control and service in your customer’s hands, has quickly turned into a much larger corporate initiative. Digital has quickly found its way into the CEO office. According to analyst firm IDC*, two-thirds of the CEO’s of Global 2000 companies will have digital as their top strategy by the end of 2017. CEO’s know that digital is an overarching strategy that will require collaboration and resources throughout their organizations to be successful.
Many changes have happened to accelerate the digital movement over the past 5 years but the two that standout to me as having the largest impact are:
- Computing Power – The proliferation of cheap, readily available computing power without large capital outlays allowed companies big and small to scale solutions and systems quickly.
- Mobile – The adoption of mobile devices has changed the way we interact with technology. Mobile allows the end user to handle their business quicker, without hassle and from anywhere.
These two changes allowed business and technology to explore use cases that weren’t available to them in the past. Startups can now innovate in incumbent business models where the barrier to entry used to be high. Many legacy business models like retailers are spending millions playing catch up on their digital strategy to stay relevant and offer similar customer experiences from disruptive innovators that they would not even have considered to be a competitor in the recent past. While newer digital companies are looking at more creative ways to improve supply chain and distribution.
Digital is becoming synonymous with innovation and value creation. Digital will continue to become known as the way businesses interface with their customers and experience the consumer ultimately has, throughout their lifecycle.
Conversations about digital used to be purely technical in nature and are now more business model and business process focused. If you aren’t innovating your business model and improving every aspect of the value proposition to your customers, using technology, then you are going to fall behind or lose ground to a new entrant in your space.
So, how do you define Digital?
*https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prAP40553215