CHAPTER 10

Conclusion

This book has drawn from over 120 business case studies through Ireland, UK, and Europe as well as academic research over the past two decades conducted in the UK, the United States, and Australia. The goal has been to provide an answer as to how to create digital business strategy.

As you are now aware this is essentially business strategy created and implemented through the lens of digital. Interestingly in a few years the title of this book will be redundant—it will be rechristened the Seven Principles of Business Strategy with the “digital” word no longer emphasized. In many ways, this future change reinforces where many businesses today are going wrong—they are obsessing about the technology and being defined by it rather focusing on leveraging value from the technology in delivering differential and innovative value propositions to customers. Our society has become a technopoly—we are taking our orders from technology and our authorization from technology (see work of Neil Postman for more on this concept). The issue, hopefully evident to you now having read this book, is that the opportunity does not lie within the technology per se but rather in the way that technology is leveraged to cocreate value with customers. That requires a marketing-oriented and strategic approach.

By looking through the lens of digital, we propose digital modeling frameworks, we explore and understand business alignment challenges cultural challenges, and we explore competency gaps that may act as barriers to success in this new context.

We must understand the ground rules and be able to make a distinction between businesses that do digital and digital businesses. The digital businesses are the ones that are winning. Senior managers can run digital businesses without fully understanding the inner workings of the technology to do so. The Seven Principles of Digital Business Strategy provides a framework where all strategic options are explored and directions proposed and explained. Whatever your business context and whatever your level of digital competency, this book will hopefully add value to your business in our digitized economy.