Over the last 5 years or so, there has been rapid evolution in a number of technologies that promise to disrupt established ways of doing business and mean that all companies driving new initiatives should always take a “Digital First” approach

1. Digital Readiness Opinion Paper
Introduction
Over the last 5 years or so, there has been rapid evolution in a number of technologies that promise
to disrupt established ways of doing business and mean that all companies driving new initiatives
should always take a “Digital First” approach. Evolution in mobile, social media, cloud and big data
are revolutionising the way consumers interact with each other and the companies they do business
with and consume services. This is creating huge new opportunities and threats for most enterprises.
Consumers of all ages are gaining familiarity and comfort with a wide range of digital channels and
are increasingly expecting high standards of digitisation.
There are many potential benefits and challenges for enterprises in becoming fully digital. Digital
technologies are being used to automate processes throughout an organisation and change the way
that employees communicate with customers, each other and how they collaborate. Lean new
entrants are creating compelling digitally based propositions for customers, often using digital
platforms for global reach but maintaining extremely low cost bases. Becoming digital must be a key
priority for all businesses.
Transitioning to a digital enterprise
Transitioning to a fully digital enterprise requires a mixture of capabilities. It needs the right
leadership, strategy and vision and will inevitably mean cultural and organisational changes. It will
need a new and unfettered way of generating and executing ideas. It will need strong focus on the
end to end customer digital customer experience your organisation creates. Whilst you may want to
or already be developing siloed digital capabilities, you will also need a way of governing your digital
investments differently to other initiatives and aggregating the capabilities you build into a digital
platform that is easy and quick to change and evolve. You will also need to build in ways of
capturing customer and employee feedback quickly and then rolling out new capabilities in days or
weeks, not months or years.
This short paper summarises our thoughts about how best-in-class digital companies are becoming
digital in a few key dimensions:
Leadership, Vision and Strategy
Execution and Delivery
Organisational and Cultural Challenges
Digitising the Customer Experience
Building a Digital Platform
The intent of this paper is to serve as a “taster” for some of the key issues that need to be addressed
in each of these areas.
Leadership, Vision and Strategy
It is important to have a clear business digitisation strategy, driven from the very top of the
organisation. The strategy should be enterprise wide though the implementation or transition
toward the strategy can and should be phased and iterative. Clear goals should exist for each

2. business unit and expected business benefits from digitisation should be stated, measured against
and evolve to reflect rapid changes in digital capabilities and trends. Governance has to reflect the
need to trial new technologies and techniques and approaches for reducing time to market and for
testing response, collecting feedback and evolving digital applications rapidly. It is important that
governance process reflect the need to pioneer, accept small failures, learn fast and continually
evolve the ideal mix of digital capabilities for your organisation.
Not only is it important to quickly develop digital solutions from within each business unit, it is
critical that the business takes an enterprise wide view of the digital roadmap and transformation
capabilities it needs to develop to become fully digital. Research by Cap Gemini has shown that
those organisations that invest in digital applications generally deliver 9% more revenue than those
that do not, whilst those that are successfully transforming their entire organisations to a digital first
approach can deliver up to 26% more profitability.
Also, bear in mind, a digital strategy and roadmap should be continually evolved to ensure it takes
into account rapidly changing trends, technologies, competitive pressures and market conditions.
Execution and Delivery
Rapid Execution and Delivery of digital initiatives is vital. Does your organisation have an efficient
way of generating ideas for digital initiatives and can it execute on these quickly. The process used
for developing a digital initiative must be designed from a complete User Experience perspective and
delivered using a highly iterative and agile based delivery methodology.
Time to market must be as short as possible. Once live, you must constantly monitor usage and
actively seek feedback from customers and have a steady flow of new features and functionality and
be bold in trying out new features and then listening for what customers think and deploying
changes quickly.
Agile engineering practices such as Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration and
Deployment and Test Automation delivering in short iterations will help keep time to market to a
minimum and keep code quality high as well as helping you quickly make and roll out changes in
your digital applications and solutions.
Many organisations start their digital initiatives within particular business units. However, it is
important that the customer sees an end to end, joined up digital experience. Therefore, delivering
digital initiatives through an overall digital platform which you can continually evolve and through
which you can package and present services from back end, partner and third party systems will help
ensure that investments in particular business unit initiatives can be deployed enterprise wide.
Organisation and Cultural Change
Any organisation that has been in business for some time will need to think about how it increases
focus and importance on digitisation from an organisation and a cultural perspective. Established
processes and knowledge workers can stifle innovation and entrepreneurial spirit. Businesses need
to promote an entrepreneurial culture across the organisation. Many lean, innovative digital startups are already revolutionising industries and companies such as Blockbuster are no longer in
business as they failed to see where their industry was heading.

3. Your organisation will need to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset and embed it in its culture. Your
staff are already using digital technologies to make gradual but significant changes to their daily lives
as consumers, they are going to expect the same as employees. They will have ideas. Leading digital
companies are trying out digital technologies to revolutionise the way employees collaborate and
communicate. They are also ensuring that digital ideas are captured, prioritised and harnessed.
Let your employees know that from now on, you want them to think and act like digital start
entrepreneurs and to bring ideas and then ensure you have governance that invests in those ideas.
Organisationally, it must be clear that digitisation is supported from the top and the board is
focussed on securing the right digital future for the company. Many organisations are creating the
role of Chief Digital Officer, others are embedding the digitisation responsibility within various senior
roles. Whichever way you do it, building an organisation with the structure and mindset to think and
act like a digital entrepreneur is key to success.
Digitising the Customer Experience
The Customer Experience is one of the first places companies look at for rapid Return on Investment
for the digital initiatives. Great benefits can be had from digitising the way customers engage with
your organisation and deliver benefits such as increased automation, improved quality, reduced
costs and a better overall customer experience and positive brand perception.
Customers expect to be able to engage digitally with your organisation across all touch points and
also expect that you can use all the data you have about them to personalise their experience and fill
in forms automatically, provide service or product recommendations that are relevant and context
sensitive.
Best in class digital companies are digitising the entire customer facing processes across all channels
and across all parts of the enterprise to provide a consistent experience. They are also making
previously internal only processes available to customers to increase the level of self-management
customers can undertake.
They are also integrating partner companies in their business processes to provide real value-add to
customers or potentially, new services or value propositions.
Using big data capabilities, companies can analyse the huge amounts of information being created
by digital transactions across all channels and see how customers react to automated services is
essential in innovating the customer experience. So too is using social networks to solicit feedback,
try out new offers and gauge customers reactions to new innovations.
Building a Digital Platform
When building digital solutions, it is best to build a digital platform upon which, new code is written
but which interfaces to all key services in legacy and 3rd party applications. The platform should
interface to all social networking platforms and support engagement with customers through any
channel and any device. It should also be cloud based and built to capture the huge amount of
information generated in a digitally enabled business. A data analysis engine should be part of the
digital platform using appropriate Big Data databases and both real time and batch based analytics

4. so your organisation can respond to real time transactions/postings being made by your customers
but also to analyse the huge amounts of digital information to lean new and interesting emerging
trends and business insights.
Organisations excellent in this category are using NoSQL databases to find interesting relationships
between seemingly unconnected data to better understand their customers and their businesses.
They are also automating processes as much as possible to support a truly rich digital customer and
partner experience. This includes automating knowledge based processes.
They are of course making use of cloud based technologies to drive down cost and speed time to
market and provide massive scalability. They are using best of breed, proven open source tools for
much of the interfacing to legacy and third party applications.
Summary
The digital future is here now and digital transformation must be a top agenda item for any serious
business. Huge opportunities exist for those companies that invest in the right digital initiatives for
their industry and organisation and these are not just in the customer experience but also in
efficiency, productivity and employee collaboration and communication. Opportunities exist in all
industries and transformation toward digitising the business and taking advantage of these
opportunities must always led from the top of the organisation. This paper highlights some of the
considerations and best practice approaches being taken by digital leaders. Check out how your
organisation compares by completing a simple “Digital Readiness Assessment Survey” on line at
www@arrkgroup/digitalreadinesssurvey.com. You will get an immediate report on how you
compare across the above 5 different dimensions and some recommendations. You will also be able
to contact one of our experts to discuss your findings and arrange for an open and honest discussion
and advice.

5. Twitter and Linked In
Digital transformation must be a top agenda item for any serious business. Check out how your
organisation compares by completing a simple “Digital Maturity Assessment Survey” on line at
www@arrkgroup/digitalreadinesssurvey.com.
You will get an immediate report on how you compare across the above 5 different dimensions and
some recommendations. You will also be able to contact one of our experts to discuss your findings
and arrange for an open and honest discussion and advice.
This short paper summarises our thoughts about how best-in-class digital companies are becoming
digital in a few key dimensions:
Leadership, Vision and Strategy
Execution and Delivery
Organisational and Cultural Challenges
Digitising the Customer Experience
Building a Digital Platform
Email
Digital transformation must be a top agenda item for any serious business. See how your
organisation compares by completing a simple “Digital Maturity Assessment Survey” on line at
www@arrkgroup/digitalquestionnaire.com
You will get an immediate report on how you compare across 5 different dimensions and some
recommendations.
If you complete the survey, we will send you a short paper summarising how best-in-class digital
companies are becoming digital in a few key dimensions:
Leadership, Vision and Strategy
Execution and Delivery
Organisational and Cultural Challenges
Digitising the Customer Experience
Building a Digital Platform