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They don't separate e-commerce and mobile from their brick-and-mortar operations - they combine all efforts into an omni-channel strategy to reach and sell to customers, whether in-store or online.
It's not just the online-bred brands - like Amazon, Google, and Alibaba- that have mastered this process. Even traditional companies founded long before the Internet are aggressively transforming their cultures.
For example, General Electric is outfitting its core products with connectivity capabilities and applying real-time analytics to the resulting data volumes. Ford Motor Company has staged a digitally-driven turnaround, and even legacy software companies - like Intuit - are successfully moving their operations online.
Digital commerce isn't confined to cloistered, Silicon Valley offices. It's ubiquitous across industries and cities.
Keys to digital success
Leaders at traditional companies must move forward with digital-first thinking, proactive marketing, and an electronically-empowered workforce. Here are four keys to a successful digital transformation:
1. Define digital.
Paint a desirable digital vision for the company - one that can be understood and embraced at all levels of the organization. Enterprise-wide cultural change takes time to evolve, so set realistic deadlines for planning, implementation, and refinement.
2. Conduct a culture assessment.
Before making significant changes, enlist someone outside of the company to assess company morale, including how employees interact and communicate with each other. These insights can help you "benchmark" your culture and determine the techniques needed to create change.
3. Set company-wide, explicit, and measurable goals.
For a digital transformation to be sustainable, leaders should create a sense of urgency and importance beyond just financial metrics. Share specific goals with employees (e.g. generating 50% of leads online within two years).
4. Lead by example.
It's important for employees to see the transformation occur at the top first. If current management leaders fail to inspire by example, they should be replaced; digital commerce is that important. A digital transformation can be challenging, especially for traditional offline brands. But each company has the potential to succeed at digital.
Adapted from a Cognizant whitepaper, "Old Dog, New Tricks: How Analog Brands Create Digital Cultures."
This post is sponsored by Cognizant.
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