Where does being a digital business happen? It happens everywhere. It has hit each and every industry and business sector. Nothing is escaping its path. It is hitting your business and company. It is affecting every department that you have in your company. It is relevant if you are the only employee or you have thousands. Size isn’t the issue.

It means something to every function you have in your business. It is about sales and marketing. It is about finance and human resources. It is about product development and distribution.

It is relevant to every process in your company. It is not just about CRM and a functioning website.

It is mostly about your business model. It is about the mindset and leadership that is either maturing or atrophying.

CapGemini Consulting was one of the first to come up with the concept of digital business change and a digital change framework as you can see below. The company did so in collaboration with the ‘MIT Center for Digital Business‘ during a three-year study which defined an effective digital transformation program as one that looked at the what and the how. It is a very useful framework. They continue to build on it and do additional research.

The McKinsey chart below shows aspects where digital business change can play:

• The (digital) customer experience (as said, de facto a key element with many digital transformations being a mix of customer experience optimization and process improvement – and cost savings).
• Product and service innovation where, for instance, co-creation models can be used.
• Distribution, marketing and sales: another usual suspect and in practice an area (along with customer service) that is often one of the earliest areas undergoing digital transformations.
• Digital fulfillment, risk optimization, enhanced corporate control, etc.

Others we can add include:

• Intelligent information management (with information, data and the processes they feed being key and a focus on activation).
• Customer service, customer experience management and contact centers, customer relationship management.
• Work, human resources, new ways of collaborating, workforce engagement and enablement (agile working, social collaboration, enterprise collaboration, unified communications,…).
• Learning and education.
• Procurement, supply chain management (with the digital supply chain) and supplier relationships.

It’s important to remind that in a digital business context, all these aspects, functions, processes, etc. are interconnected and silos have less (or no) place, not from a technological perspective but most of all also not from a process and people perspective.