Successfully Implementing Digital Commerce Strategy in Your Organisation

Opinion: I regularly hear people talking about implementing their digital commerce strategy into their organisation and where should this start – “Is it with IT?” or “Does it start with Marketing?” the answer always is “it starts with your customer!”.

Before embarking on a digital transformation program we need to firstly consider and assess our customers, market conditions and our own capability to match the changing requirements we uncover – I would further offer that in every initiative we should follow a common 5 step approach of:

1. Assess & Plan: What is happening in our market and what are our current capabilities?
2. Map Customer & Business Processes: How do our customers engage with us?
3. Align Organisation: Evangelise our organisation & people towards ‘being digital’
4. Empower Agility: Instill Operational Excellence using a Customer Centric Approach.
5. Repeat & Scale: Re-Use and scale up and out across the organisation.

As the global workforce goes through another iteration with more and more digital natives and digitally dependent employees representing a higher proportion of the workforce we, as organisations, need to ensure our traditional methods of engaging with these customers transforms along with their changing needs for engagement – it is worth noting that Radio took 38 years to reach 50 Million people while recently Pokemon Go! took only 19 days to reach the same amount of people – that is how fast our world has changed and I suspect it will continue to evolve at pace.

Once organisations have commenced their digital commerce journey I would further offer that it is vitally important to have full and open engagement rather than a traditional silo approach – I would recommend an approach which includes:

1. Specific Goals: A clear understanding of what we are planning to achieve and by when supported by defined metrics
2. Collaboration: A whole company cross-collaboration effort aligned with commercial goals.
3. Executive Story Telling: At every opportunity inspire the workforce to new ways of working, thinking and creating value.
4. Business Model: How we change and adapt in order to remain relevant to our customers.
5. Leadership Commitment: Regular, in-person, participation from leaders across the organisation working toward one common goal.

Using a quote from Charles Darwin:

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent – it is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

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