It has become even more evident from the COVID-19 lockdowns that it is the businesses that have embraced digital that will be those that have the resilience to survive and thrive through a disruptive event such as this.
A case in point has been the businesses that have seen demand for their products increase exponentially. The websites of home delivery shopping services have struggled when demand goes up, use of apps like Deliveroo and Just Eat become even more popular as people want restaurant food delivered to their door.
Another case has been the cycle market, creating headlines like this from the BBC:
Coronavirus: ‘Your new bike won’t be in stock until 2021’ – the cycle search frenzy
BBC news article, June 2020
Looking at the website traffic of a sample of the bike manufacturers, its easy to see that as lockdown in kicked in, there was a massive spike in people visiting their websites, which has continued in to the autumn:
Figure 1 Web traffic over last 12 months for cycling equipment manufacturer websites. (source: similarweb)
The bike companies were clearly able to cope with the extra traffic to their website, but the supply chain was not ready to meet that demand for months to come. Building digital resilience across the business is needed to be able to flex to meet such spikes and incidents.
So what can looking at the Digital capability of a company tell us about their readiness? Your website may be ready, but what about the digital capability of the rest of your business?
At Deltabase we look at 6 factors that define the digital maturity of a business: Strategy, Business Model, Customer Engagement, Data, Technology and People & Culture.
Strategy
Making sure the approach to the business’ strategy is ready to build a digital transformation strategy, you have the right skills on the leadership team, the governance in place and you have the performance tracking to check you’re making progress.
Business Model
Do you have a digitalised set of products and services, are you using process automation to reduce cost and increase agility? Is the supply chain digitalised to offer flexibility and resilience to meet the demand you expect and the ability to scale up on demand when needed? Having back office functions digitalised is important so your processes can flex and scale as demand increases. Ensure you have the innovation capabilities in place so you can move faster than the competition.
Customer Engagement
Getting insight from the behaviour of your customers – knowledge is power in a digitalised business and having access to real-time information enables you to respond rapidly and with agility. Digital commerce is important – with suppliers and through ecommerce with you customers – hosting digitally in the cloud gives you flexibility and methods to increase your capacity as demand dictates. A strong set of customer engagement channels online through your website and social channels supports this.
Data
Do you have the capabilities to maximise the value of your data? Is there a data supporting culture in the business? Is it able to protect and control its data assets? Customer won’t trust you to do business if you can’t. Being able to utilise that data to drive decision making is important to a fast moving and flexible digital approach to business.
Technology
Do you have a modern cloud-hosted technology landscape to support your business? Having a flexible environment where you can increase capacity rapidly as the business environment changes is vital in responding to being resilient when you need to be. This helps keep the environment secure from cyber threats as well as driving efficient TCO.
People & Culture
The often neglected afterthought. Making sure the tone from top and the skills from the leadership team reflect the digital ambitions of the company will embed thinking in how the company operates. Ensuring these capabilities are reflected throughout the comp[any through training and development will keep your digital skills and resilience top of mind, and help build that all important culture of innovation to drive your digital transformation and business resilience.
Deltabase can help
If you want to find out the Dx score of your business, or a business you’re interested in, then please reach out and we’d be happy to discuss and how we can help: