How to Maximise the Business Values of Your Digital Investments

CIOs must have a plan for investing scarce technology resources to accelerate digital business outcomes. Organisation should be able to identify and prioritise business opportunities that allow technology to have an immediate and valuable impact on core organisation outcomes. They can build an investment plan that demonstrates measurable impact to the organisation. The digital investment plan also will discover how technology can engage the organisation in the prioritisation of technology resources to maximise the benefit of digitisation efforts.

The Key Enablers

Figure 1: Digital Leadership Roles (Source: World Economic Forum)

Significant uncertainty exists around digital transformation, and positive returns are not guaranteed. Preparing for digitalisation does not mean making small adjustments to existing stiff business processes. It requires a deep cultural shift to embrace continuous change. The best leaders recognise this and build strong knowledge on digital technologies and how they change their business. They form a clear communication loop across workforce levels to share their digital vision.

While innovation is ingrained in new organisations and startups, traditional players need to find ways to embed it into their businesses. Because digital transformation is not achieved instantly across an organisation, established organisations should start with a small segment, learn, build expertise and then scale up. Leaders have the key role of uniting the stakeholders (business units, workforce, customers and shareholders) behind the overall vision and purpose of digital transformation.

Deploying new technologies is not enough to drive digital transformation. There is also a responsibility on leadership to orchestrate an environment in which digital investments can realise their full potential. That means not only setting a digital strategy and vision, but empowering people throughout an organisation to be innovative and entrepreneurial.

Measuring the Digital Investments

The average organisation enjoys positive revenue and productivity returns on digital investments, but for many firms it is still a challenge to measure the value impact of new technologies at the organisation level. Having such a measure is particularly important when building the business case for investing in a new technology or monitoring the performance of a newly implemented technology.

Investment in digital technologies is always an investment in increasing options in a world of uncertainties. Under this assumption, if investment projects are designed to be continuously monitored and can easily be stopped, the new options they open can be more valuable than the initial investment.

Many industries have begun to digitally transform, and organisations that have successfully implemented digital initiatives are already considering their next steps. To catch up with these digital leaders, other firms must now anticipate the next wave of disruptors in their sector. As organisations launch or overhaul their digital investment strategies, they should consider to maximise their digital investment for a better digital journey.