A digital strategy identifies the business objectives that can be advanced with the help of digital services. A good digital strategy discards unprofitable ideas, refines the best ones, focuses on the customer, paints the big picture, and outlines the path to progress.

An appropriate digital service package is an essential and effective means to achieve business objectives—even when the core of the business does not revolve around online activities. Effective and measurable development of the package requires an underlying digital strategy.

I refer to the following as a digital strategy model.

• Select the business objectives that can be supported by digital solutions.

• Evaluate what it would mean to build digital solutions.

• Create a plan for implementing the solutions.

We divide this strategy model into three distinct stages.

Stage 1: Selecting business objectives and building hypotheses

A company can set endless objectives for its business. The task of a company's strategy is to eliminate 99% of these infinite possibilities and name the selected objectives.

The task of the digital strategy is to sift out those selected objectives that can be supported by digital services. It's easy to throw out wishes, but in reality, a small or medium-sized business should not take on more than three major objectives simultaneously. Often, the correct number of objectives is one.

If the avalanche of objectives from business management is overwhelming, it's worth discussing realism and prioritisation before moving on to the next stage.

Assessing the suitability of objectives is crucial: it determines whether the outcome has any chance of success. I have found it helpful to consider the assumed business impact of each objective and its digital feasibility during the evaluation.

Let me provide examples of objectives I frequently encounter.

1. Reducing sales time (often for specific products or services)
2. Increasing customer satisfaction
3. Successful follow-up sales (retention)
4. Creating sales-qualified leads

All of these can be assessed based on their business impact and digital implementability. In practice, the evaluation emerges from interviews and workshops conducted with business and sales leaders. The result is a set of scored objectives, placed into the matrix shown below.

The evaluation of objectives often leads to the first hypotheses about what sort of digital solutions can support the achievement of those objectives, and what the expected outcome might be—what is to be achieved. Hypotheses must be developed to a point where they can inform decisions about how to proceed.

Experience is essential in forming a good hypothesis. One must roughly know how much it costs to build various digital services. What is the price of, say, an online store, ordering system, or customer portal? It's also important to understand the expectations for what solutions can and cannot deliver. Will the end-user be willing to create an account for yet another portal, and what added value must it provide to encourage them to do so?

A hypothesis grounded in experience and researched information also needs to be put to the critical test by end-users. User tests and interviews should play a crucial role when a company decides whether to implement a service.

A good strategy keeps open the possibility that plans taken to the hypothesis level can be struck through with a big red cross. An essential part of success is ensuring the wrong things are left undone.

Stage 2: Forming the big picture

In the second stage, the company has prioritised its business objectives and selected those which it can best address with digital solutions. Additionally, the company has described the hypotheses about the expected outcomes and formed some understanding of the sizes of investments and ongoing costs.

The next step is to integrate the developing services into the company’s existing infrastructure. I recommend doing this by visualising the customer touchpoints with the company and the technologies required to fulfill these touchpoints.

The digital big picture encompasses all the company's services and social media channels where the company and its customers interact. It is also a good place to visualise the desired movement of target groups between services. The big picture provides an overview of how the company wishes to be digitally present in its customer’s everyday life and purchasing decisions.

The top-level architecture image names the system entities behind customer journeys. Its task is to convey what is required for the planned customer experience to materialise. The image also draws system integrations, and the accompanying document further details the information managed by different systems.

The architecture image exposes potential structural flaws and overlaps in the plans before actual technical design begins, assisting in cost perception. 

The digital strategy's architectural image will be deepened and enriched as systems are acquired. This image is ideally developed collaboratively with the organisation's ICT leadership.

Stage 3: Drawing the development roadmap

Following the selection of objectives, the design of hypotheses, and the drawing of the big picture, it is time to plan what transitioning from the current state A to the documented target state B requires. I recommend drawing a development roadmap for this purpose—it is a tool that helps convert the digital strategy into reality.

The roadmap can follow any recognised presentation method that clearly indicates the order of development work and the dependencies. For simpler structures, I utilise drawing features of presentation tools, and for more complex ones, I rely on Gantt charts.

I recommend drawing the roadmap initially without any time constraints. The most important thing is for the drafter to consider how the next piece of the puzzle can be feasibly implemented.

The group executing the digital strategy might, as they draw the roadmap, fall into a state I call the ERP lock: all development efforts appear to be stalled behind a long-overdue ERP renewal. To address this, I suggest designing subdivisions and temporarily forgetting perpetually pending source systems. No business can afford to wait for eternal projects to finish!

Once completed, the roadmap should be placed in a calendar, and preliminary estimates made for the duration of development projects. An appropriate granularity is every six months or at the most detailed, quarterly.

A good strategy always includes monitoring progress and results. The roadmap must respond to this need by communicating the statuses of development projects. This section should be actively maintained once practical work begins.

After drawing the roadmap, you should have a digital strategy that stems from business objectives, considers the operational environment and development resources, and is crowned by a concrete plan of affairs to be pursued.

The digital strategy is made, but progress stalls – What to do?

Did you create a good strategy, but now it's left gathering dust on the shelf and resurfaces during moments tinted with self-loathing as you flounder among the loudest ad hoc ideas from “stakeholders,” without a hint of a plan?

No worries, it's possible to get back on track!

To support the digital strategy, I recommend implementing a cross-company governance model, allowing all parties involved to revisit the plan repeatedly and experience shared successes from progress.