Are we all speaking the same language when it comes to building a digital business? It helps to look at what a digital business is not.

• Improving your digital business is not just about digital marketing. That’s an important part of the business activities and it’s the context in which digital business is often used. A digital business will cut across most every business function and department. What is your plan to prioritize investments across the enterprise? Where do you need different leadership than you have in place today?
• Improving your digital business is not just about digital customer behavior, although it plays a role and customers are increasingly ‘digital and mobile’. It is also heavily about employee behavior. Do you have the right people on the bus?
• Improving your digital business is not just about technological disruptions because the disruptions are always about customers, workers, markets, competitors and stakeholders. Even if is related to technological evolutions and knowing that ’emerging’ technologies indeed can have a ‘disruptive’ effect, it is not just about the technology. Do you have the kind of culture to move faster, invest quicker and innovate sooner?
• Improving your digital business is not just about the movement of paper into digital information as originally meant nor the digitization of information (flows) and business processes, which is simply a condition sine quod non.

Finally, the reason why we would prefer to speak about accelerated business improvement or, if needed, digital business improvement, is that it’s just a matter of time before no one makes a distinction between digital and physical or offline and online. Customers, for instance, don’t think in these terms at all, nor in the terms of channels. For example, customers may be in your physical store checking out pricing info in real time.

Here is a perfect example of digital and physical completely disappearing as being relevant. Amazon Go is a new kind of store with no checkout required. Amazon created the world’s most advanced shopping technology so you never have to wait in line. With their Just Walk Out Shopping experience, customers simply use the Amazon Go app to enter the store, take the products they want, and go! No lines, no checkout. (No, seriously.)

Their checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning. Amazon’s Just Walk Out Technology automatically detects when products are taken from or returned to the shelves and keeps track of them in a virtual cart. When you’re done shopping, you can just leave the store. Shortly after, Amazon will send them a receipt and charge their Amazon account.

The world of a digital business is moving fast. Consumer expectations will continue to put the pressure on your company to be a part of this world. Are you ready?

Amazon Go – No lines … No checkout