Top 5 Digital Transformation Best Practices: 2. Vision and Goals

This is relatively simple but a step in your digital transformation you can’t skip. Most every company has a strategy. Your digital strategy should align to your overall company strategy. For example, if you differentiate yourself in your marketplace by targeting a specific type of client or by being a full service, high touch type of company, you digital customer experience shouldn’t jettison the competitive differentiators you’ve built up over time. You digital strategy should extend that across all the customer touch points that will exist.

In the same vein, you don’t start a transformation without defining your overall vision and setting some goals.  You want your vision to align to your company strategy.  You want it to be simple and easily understood.  With the goals, you want to define measurable indicators that determine your progress towards your vision.   I’ve found this fairly important because later in the planning portion of your transformation you will need to prioritize what to do.  I can guarantee that you will have disagreement. Some will focus on their specific agenda related to their department or job function rather than the overall company need. By having a vision and goals, you can point them to it and ask them, “How does this need align to the vision?”

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That of course leads us to a key point I want to make. You cannot set a vision in a vacuum. You have to get the right people lined up on the vision.  They have to participate in making it and they have to agree with the vision so they can go and tell their teams what it is and why it’s important. Failure to do this will sink you attempts at prioritizing the key tasks in your roadmap.  It will also sink the overall initiative as everyone goes off on different tangents.

One last thing, as you define your vision, take into account what you gained from the insights part of this transformation I highlighted in my previous post.  I’ll summarize it here:

1. Who is my customer and what do they really want?
2. How digitally mature is my company?
3. What are my direct competitors doing?

Other Parts to the series

Don’t forget the other parts of this series:

1. Gain Insight
2. Vision and Goals
3. Culture