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Новый фокус CIO в эру цифровой экономики
2 октября 2013 Растущая популярность цифровых технологий изменила традиционные шаблоны поведения как руководства бизнеса, так и его потребителей. В результате клиенты не упускают возможностей взаимодействовать с окружающим миром посредством социальных сетей в удобные для них время, месте и каналах коммуникации. Тем временем, компании переосмысливают операционные процессы и каналы сбыта продуктов и услуг, собирая и анализируя детальную информацию о клиентах. Чтобы помочь компаниям преуспеть в эпоху цифровой экономики и воспользоваться всеми возможностями, CIO должны изменить свой фокус и приоритетность задач. Подробнее об этом читайте в данной статье. (Материал опубликован на английском языке)To help companies play and win in the digital economy, today’s CIOs need to understand how and where digital forces are affecting IT and what opportunities the new technologies can bring to their business. Unless CIOs are actively engaged in these changes, they may not be able to support the new demands that will be placed on the company. In this article, we survey four important areas on which CIOs should focus in order to help their organizations capture opportunities in the digital economy. (See Exhibit 1.)
Changing Venues: Your Business in the Palm of Your Customer’s Hand
The ubiquity of mobile devices means that the venue of interaction with customers now resides in the palm of the hand. Customers can access products and services on the go and increasingly expect companies to field and fulfill their requests immediately, wherever and whenever they want. Even traditional periods of downtime—while commuting, waiting in line, or sitting in front of the television—are now times when consumers pursue online activities. And these are not just passive activities, such as Internet browsing, but increasingly include active pursuits such as banking and shopping; indeed, for some banks, online banking spikes during popular TV shows. As consumers search for information, make purchase decisions, place and track orders, or receive service and support, they demand a seamless journey back and forth across physical and digital channels. And they expect relevant, socially engaged, location-specific interactions on whatever device they choose to use.
These new interactions and expectations have important implications. Companies can no longer simply replicate functions from one channel to another. Instead, they must consider the distinct roles of each channel for their customers. Every industry faces unique issues in delivering a consistent customer experience. For example, in retail, companies must work through the logistical and management challenges presented by customers returning online purchases to physical stores and the impact of this trend on a store’s metrics of sales versus returns.
This profound change in the interface between customers and companies is happening rapidly. In some markets, online banking took a decade to capture 50 percent of transactions; in many markets today, the equivalent shift to mobile has taken just a year, with mobile now the dominant venue for banking.
Today’s CIOs must work out how to balance day-to-day operations and project delivery with the new challenges they face. Getting it right means creating technology platforms equipped to deal with the rapid changes being wrought by the digital economy. Getting it wrong will put the company in the position of having to constantly react to change, with IT being seen as the problem rather than the solution. In BCG’s experience, CIOs must do the following in order to deal successfully with these challenges:
- Systematically evaluate how well the company’s systems across both digital and physical channels support customers, and define a course of action to address problems and gaps. This goes beyond simply replicating capabilities and functions across channels. In the past, many companies made the mistake of treating mobile as a simpler version of the online channel, with a smaller form factor. It is important to recognize the uniqueness of the mobile platform and to fully exploit its power and connectivity, as well as the intimate role it plays in consumers’ daily life. Meeting those demands will require core services delivered through channels and enterprise systems to be altered and reshaped.
- Set out the target state for the company’s technology and a pragmatic, multiyear road map that delivers value quickly. The plan must put in place building blocks and capabilities for the long term, while also giving the company enough flexibility to respond to the next wave of digital capabilities. Lessons from the dot-com decade should be heeded. In their urgency to become digital, businesses must avoid creating technical and operational silos that diminish their ability to integrate across channels and that subsequently require rework and reintegration.
- Be prepared for a significant increase in transaction volumes and a changing mix across channels. The take-up rate and shift in digital services can be rapid, exceeding many capacity plans, so it pays to be prepared. Loss of service is unacceptable when customers increasingly expect 24-7 service. Cost-effectively managing average and peak loads will be critical, as will new capabilities to predict demand and match supply from new infrastructure-sourcing models.
Digital Operations: Reconfiguring How and Where Work Happens
Digital is also changing business processes inside the workplace, whether by eliminating paper or by providing up-to-date mobile information to inform the decisions and activities of employees wherever they are during the 24-hour operations cycle. This is not just about supporting a bring-your-own-device policy; rather, it is about freeing employees from being desk-bound and helping them access information and perform functions on devices directly linked to core platforms. Examples of these new practices abound. A large retailer is already using mobile devices with an attached bar-code scanner to manage its inventory, and a bank is using mobile devices to help staff spend more time with customers, to manage the flow of sales, and to reduce queuing in the branch. Yet another company is leveraging its sizable workforce to provide customer support via Twitter, gaining a competitive advantage over pure-online retailers. The CIO has a role to play in supporting an organization’s internal digital operations by focusing on the following:
- Embedding Flexibility in Systems to Support Different Business Configurations. How and where employees work is in flux as businesses reconfigure themselves for the digital economy. As a result, functions once performed in physical locations may move online, back-office support functions may move to the front office, and call center activities may move to customer self-service. The design challenge is to avoid implicit assumptions in operating systems about who does what work where using what device. Instead, flexibility must be embedded in the design across systems, from the user interface and device to the system authentication and authorization processes.
- Systematically Providing Access to Information and Distributing Tasks Among Workers Wherever They Are. Many employees still need to be physically located near the paper-based files that are the basis of their work. Typically, companies manage the activities of staff using tools like document imaging and process workflow. While these approaches are well suited to complex, long-running processes such as insurance claim processing, simpler activities, such as placing or reviewing the status of an order, can benefit from a move to digital alternatives. Digital operations allow workers to move away from filing cabinets and closer to the customer, giving them access to the information they need on a variety of desktop and mobile devices and allocating work and approvals across locations and teams using task management platforms that improve productivity, responsiveness, and costs.
- Building Skills and Capabilities to Support the Delivery of New Digital Services Across Increasingly Diverse Devices, Form Factors, and Operating Platforms. A device-agnostic approach limits the ability to readily exploit the unique features of each type of device. If and until industry standards emerge, a device-specific approach risks significantly increased costs to support multiple platforms. A considered plan is required that focuses on the penetration of different devices in specific markets in order to balance the tradeoffs among richness, reach, and utility.
- Supporting the Needs of the Marketing Function. In order to execute new campaigns, marketing increasingly requires the IT function to provide new marketing and information platforms that integrate social media and customers’ social graphs. IT must also provide digital listening solutions to monitor feeds and user-generated content, as well as information services to participate in augmented search. This will require new building blocks in a digital-ready IT architecture and new points of integration with traditional IT.
The digital economy will clearly force significant changes on an enterprise’s systems and architecture. The challenge will be to understand these changes in sufficient depth to create a pragmatic multiyear road map that delivers value quickly but also puts in place the building blocks and capabilities for the longer term. This is of particular importance when addressing the advantage to be gained from the new types of information available in the digital economy.
Information Advantage: The Internet of People, Places, and Things Over Time
Today’s smartphones and tablets are incredibly powerful, connected, and rich in features. Equipped with almost a dozen sensors, they can determine their own location and respond to audio, voice, touch, kinetic, and visual inputs. Because these devices generate such a wealth of information at every interaction, their utility to their owners is potentially dwarfed by their value to the business. (See Exhibit 2.) Each interaction generates an associated “event” that potentially offers a company information about the following:
- People: those accessing the service, their relationship to the company and to others with whom they interact—through e-mail, social media, and contacts
- Place: the location where the interaction occurs and what and who is there and nearby
- Things: the objects the device is interacting with
- Time: when the event occurred
One of the competitive dynamics in the digital economy is the fight to control this rich stream of data. Companies need to find ways to exploit this information in order to influence customers’ current and future actions. Done poorly, these efforts can lead to missed opportunities to understand customer behavior or to breach-of-privacy issues. Done well, they can provide companies—and especially incumbents—with new opportunities to offer customized services and to optimize their physical and digital footprints.
To develop the ability to capture, analyze, and exploit this information, CIOs must focus on the following:.
- Ensuring That the Strategy for Mobile Applications Includes a Focus on Information. Mobile solutions and apps must provide a useful service. But companies often overlook the question of what value can be gained from the information that these applications generate. Data about people, places, and things accumulated over time can be used to improve marketing, optimize channels, gain insights into customers, and improve operations. Assessing the potential value of this information must be part of every design. The overall design of mobile apps must also include sufficient capacity to capture, store, and analyze this potential flood of information.
- Integrating the Data Generated by Mobile Devices with Existing Internal Data. Data from mobile apps is doubly valuable when analyzed in combination with existing information about customers. Such analysis is the source of one of the greatest advantages of incumbents, which—compared with new entrants—can augment new data with an especially rich base of historical information. This ability presents opportunities for fresh insights into existing customers, behaviors, and relationships that can inform marketing, and fresh insights into channels and operations that be used to further optimize internal resources and the physical footprint. But ensuring that all these sources of data are aligned and of sufficient quality requires that companies first address issues of data coverage, accuracy, completeness, and consistency.
- Extending the Existing Information Strategy and Road Maps to Include Digital. Digital must be a core element of a company’s information strategy in order to exploit the value of this rich source of new customer and operational insights.
Organizing for Two-Speed IT: Fostering New Capabilities and Innovation
In the digital economy, barriers to entry are low for new entrants, digital agencies, and startups. All have ready access to content, development tools, and low-cost, scalable, cloud-based computing infrastructure that make it far easier now than in the past to innovate and deploy solutions quickly. In this environment, there is a risk that companies will bypass IT and create the silos and fragmented IT systems that were typical of the dot-com days, as well as the subsequent costs involved in reintegrating these solutions into operations.
The IT organization needs two speeds of service delivery. The first—“industrial” speed—is the optimized speed at which IT, in its customary role, can deliver service to the business. The second—digital speed—is the speed necessary to enable and drive the company’s digital agenda. CIOs can help their business organize for two-speed IT by doing the following:
- Set up the processes and tools for projects, solution delivery, and testing so that they support different streams of development. This will help the organization actively manage the tradeoffs between innovation and speed, on the one hand, and the production risks that arise from rapid change to core business systems, on the other.
- Change the mix of internal skills and external partners. Successful innovators bring together staff with very diverse backgrounds and talents. They establish new vendor partnerships to source technical and online industrial-design skills and expertise. They complement this by interacting with communities and engaging startups rather than doing everything in-house.
- Foster innovation through open networks, opening up the business and the IT organization to new ideas from citizen innovators, volunteers, customers, and followers keen to interact with brands and products. Today, a small number of companies are creating innovation funds, offering prizes to startups for innovations in channels, services, products, and community involvement. Social media provide the platform, and participation increases engagement and creates advocates for tech-savvy consumers.
The IT organization will be at the forefront of those companies that win in the digital economy. As more and more customers, and more and more companies, join the race, the CIO will be expected to support and help set the direction for this transition. The new focus for the CIO will be on developing clear insights into how to extract value for the business from the rich sources of information and opportunity now available.
Source: bcgperspectives.com
