| | August 20179CIOReviewbased on their technical expertisefind that dig-ital projects require new skills and a new way of thinking of themselves as "Business Owners." Five points to considerAs an IT business owner, you can lead a grow-ing range of digital technology projects, whether it's implementing new platforms, deploying mo-bile solutions or updating existing systems us-ing human-centric design. In all cases, you still need to tie digital to business value in order to justify spending. Here are five points that need to be considered:1) Revenue growth and improved margins: This is perhaps the strongest argument for digi-tal. A good example of how to build a business case that can help sell your initiative internally is e-commerce. Properly developed and sup-ported, digital commerce can help move IT from a spend organization to a revenue-gener-ating organization with its own P & L. Digital commerce can also create a multiplier effect for any investment supporting digital projects and platforms. Compared to traditional channels and physical stores, digital can help companies to scale much faster and expand their footprint into new products, services, markets and geog-raphies. Digital can also lower the costs of ser-vicing customers while growing sales in exist-ing accounts, increasing sales in new accounts, and improving customer retention rates. Digital commerce can happen anytime from anywhere and facilitate faster pay-ments, thereby accelerating the order-to-cash cycle.2) Speed-to-market: A properly designed and im-plemented digital initiative can significantly improve speed to market. Innova-tive goods and services can be introduced without the time and effort required to expand infrastructure. The time and effort needed to secure upfront CAPEX (capital expenditure) funding can also be reduced. 3) Operational excellence: Digital cuts across many layers, processes, and functions CIOs are now responsible for a wider and more complex range of technology enablement projects for customerssuch as technology, data and analytics, or-ganizational structure, supply chain and customer care. Brands can get an end-to-end view of a customer and employee inter-action, enabling them to monitor every step of the process. This identifies the friction points, helps resolve issues more quickly based on a holistic view of the interaction, facilitates straight-through processing, and illuminates the value proposition for opti-mizing operations.4) Customer intimacy: Studying customer behavior to get an understanding of what they care about is a clear benefit with digi-tal technology. Companies can observe and measure customer behavior more closely through the quantitative data. Customer feedback and buying patterns can be ana-lyzed to help identify concerns, anticipate future needs, identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, and guide strategic planning. Digital can also improve the customer ex-perience by reducing human error in order taking and processing, providing support, and giving customers ready access to a wealth of product information and competi-tive reviews online.5) Industry trends: This involves analyz-ing digital technology trends and under-standing investments and outcomes across your industry. It can also provide you with a basis to assess the ROI for an initiative, including revenue forecasts and long-term growth rates. It's also important to under-stand where the industry trends are not going, is there a way to be different, even learn something from a different industry.Most people agree that having a digital strategy can support sustainable growth and is now a normal part of a company's tech-nology solutions portfolio. Eventually, we'll reach a place where doing business via mo-bile apps will be as routine as getting your company email address the first day on a new job. While the acknowledgement for digital solutions is high, the ability to ar-ticulate business value remains elusive and can be the difference between simply busi-ness as usual and being seen as a strategic business partner in the organization.
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