What is digital?

An excellent digital experience is not just a good looking website. An excellent digital experience is not just a highly personalized mobile app. An excellent digital experience is achieving the cohesive delivery of solutions that meet the customers needs where they are, when they need and how they need for your enterprise. This uniform suite of experiences put the customer at the heart of your digital experiences, and done well a functional interactional can establish an emotional connection to your brand.

Digital experiences are more than the sum of their parts.

Digital is this connected web, both internal and external to your enterprise, that enables people to make a choice. For the typical enterprise the goal is for the customer to purchase your product or stay engaged on your platform longer. The “Five Whys Technique” would likely tell us these are not the true goal, and ultimately becomes about profit (It is important to note that goals and profit are not the same as purpose.)

Why digital is easy?

Anyone can create a website. Anyone can create a mobile app. Everyone uses this technology every day, often before even getting out of bed. “4 out of 5 smartphone owners” 1 check their phone within 15 minutes of waking up. This combination of minimal barriers to entry, and consistent exposure to highly optimised digital experiences hides the complexity, the cost, and the expertise that has been invested to achieve. Of course, not all digital ecosystems require significant investment. For many websites that one would create themselves, the goal is to establish a digital presence2. For those wanting to do business in the digital world many drag and drop website builders 3 4 5 can be used cheaply and easily.

Why digital is hard?

The ease of entry into the development of digital experiences contributes to the challenges in achieving excellence, or the perception of excellence. Excellence in digital does require excellence at the surface, where UX Specialists and Copywriters can establish composable building blocks, or leveraging pre built components from the various digital platforms. However, the excellence cannot end at the surface.

The Digital Iceberg shows the Digital Experience as the peak of the Iceberg and the complex invisible capabilities beneath the surface.

The Digital Iceberg

Excellence requires establishing a toolbox of capabilities to that enable digital success. Many of these tools are obvious, many required only for the massive enterprise, and some will be the key differentiator that accelerates your enterprise forward in the digital world. It is the cumulative effect of these various capabilities that provide the experience that customers expect.

The technology, whilst by no means an easy problem, is often the easiest part of digital success in an enterprise. Instead the people and politics are the hardest barrier to cross. Many will happily admit they have just enough knowledge to be dangerous and wear it as a badge of honour. Few are willing to accept what danger that badge brings6 when worn proudly by decision makers. These well intentioned, typically short sighted individuals can give executives a sense of comfort. Working around, educating, and illuminating this problematic thinking, that is happy to be constrained by “just enough knowledge” can quickly become a full time job for digital leaders.

Why Digital has a long way to go?

The joy of Digital is that it will never be “done”, despite what many executives believe7. The technologies may change, new channels will emerge, but customer expectations will always evolve. What good looks like for one industry will be impacted by another - what’s more what looks good for entirely isolated industries quickly changes as expectations evolve. Digital leaders must challenge the emergence of change apathy or quickly fall behind.

Digital leaders must challenge the emergence of change apathy.

“Good enough” will remain enough until it is not. When the inflection point reaches an industry those enterprises that have not maintained their Digital capability will be forced to deliver a costly transformation with the harm already done to their disenfranchised customers. Made harder by those customers who remain being those most likely to be resistent to any change to the status quo. The cyclical nature of many enterprises funding models may make this transformation cycle an inevitability, but remains a battle that must be fought else competitors will happily fill the void.

You make your own reality. And once you’ve done it, apparently, everyone’s of the opinion it was all so f****ing obvious.8

- HBO Succession

From the outside8, it is very easy to perceive the current state of digital as obvious. Of course you need a website, or an app, or a chatbot. Of course boring banking would create FinTechs that can give the best digital players a run for their money. The baseline expectations of today is built upon the shoulders of our predecessors - but those predeccors strove towards the future, they did not sit back and decide today is enough. If you do you will only be playing catch up and striving for convergence, not innovation.

  1. https://www.nu.nl/files/IDC-Facebook%20Always%20Connected%20(1).pdf “Always Connected How Smartphones And Social Keep Us Engaged” ↩︎

  2. https://www.godaddy.com/en-au/websites/website-builder “GoDaddy Website Builder” ↩︎

  3. https://mailchimp.com/features/online-store/ “MailChimp Store Builder” ↩︎

  4. https://business.adobe.com/products/magento/magento-commerce.html “Adobe Magento” ↩︎

  5. https://www.shopify.com/ “Shopify” ↩︎

  6. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intentional-insights/201710/knowing-just-enough-be-dangerous ↩︎

  7. https://thefinanser.com/2017/11/banker-weve-done-digital-skinner-oh-dear “Banker: We’ve Done Digital! Skinner: Oh Dear” ↩︎

  8. https://www.hbo.com/succession “HBO Succession ↩︎