Digital transformation and the CDO: what you need to know

So Andy, to be successful as a CDO, you obviously need to have the right support. So whether that's resources or money or time, but in your view, what's the key factor in setting up a successful digital organisation?

In my experience, what's particular to digital is the amount you need to rely on the rest of the organisation in order to deliver. Ensuring that within your team, you have the capability to engage with different functions and work within their portfolios is really important. When I started as a CDO, digital had lost some of its credibility. So our path to success was in small wins to be able to show that value and get the engagement and support from the other functions for us to be successful. How about with the clients you've worked with?

So I worked with a consumer goods organisation to help set their digital strategy. And what became clear in that case was that they'd need to invest in some of their foundational capabilities to make the digital strategy successful. So a good example of that was data analytics. They were already doing some work in that space, but it became clear that data was a source of frustration across many of their stakeholder groups. They found it hard to access, to organise, to drive meaningful consumer insights from it. So one of our recommendations was that they expand the work that they were doing in that space already to build a stronger capability to help realise their digital vision.

Ami, you recently worked with a global consumer products company to create a digital strategy. You started by working with them to create a digital vision. What did you do next?

So we used that vision to identify the series of digital initiatives that they would need to put in place to deliver that vision. They already had lots of projects in flight, and so we helped them to identify additional projects that they'd need to deliver the strategy. We help them to prioritise and group projects logically. So for example, all the projects that were centred around improving consumer data were grouped together. And then we helped them to identify a group of pilot projects they could use to test concepts. And we recommend that they use one brand or market to really test those concepts and deliver results quickly.

Demonstrating the practicality and the deliverability of a digital strategy by experience is really important to bring the stakeholders onside. In my CEO role, we created projects within specific markets chosen for their particular characteristics like customers or particular market size in order to generate proof points. And we could use these proof points to show that the assumptions and this approach that we put in the strategy were going to work, also to improve things so that we can make changes for the next phase.

A great digital strategy is one that helps the business deliver its aims. That might be increased market share, greater revenue, or increased profitability. Your Chief Digital Officer or the digital function will create and own that strategy, and while it's important that it's practical, you need to start on the outcomes. You need to think about what you want to achieve before you think about how you achieve it. Ami, you recently worked with a global consumer products company to develop a digital strategy. How did you go about it?

So in that example, it was really clear that there was no single understanding of the word digital. It just meant different things to different people. So for some stakeholders, it meant e-commerce, and for others, it meant consumer analytics, for example. And that's not uncommon. So in a global organisation with multiple brands operating at different levels of maturity and in a matrix environment, some of that was definitely to be expected. So it was really important to galvanise their leadership around a definition of digital that we could then turn into a digital vision, which was anchored on that definition. And what really helped with that was to look at it through three angles. The first one was consumer experience. So how do you make it easy for consumers of your brands to shop your brands online and have a consistent experience, no matter which channel they're using. The second one was identifying opportunities to drive new revenue through digital streams. So that could be online-only brands, or it could be, for example, subscription models. And the third one was around transformation of functions. So, for example, HR, supply chain, finance, looking at opportunities for digitisation through adoption of new technologies.

Having a Chief Digital Officer as a separate role isn't always mandatory, is it? So it really depends on the digital maturity of your organisation.

That's right. If you choose to have a Chief Digital Officer as a separate role, you need to make sure that they're sufficiently empowered in order to be successful. Typically, this would be within the CEO's direct line and exec team, or it could be within one of the functions that closely aligns with what you're trying to achieve with your strategy. Really here, the trick is to make sure that they're set up for success within your organisation so they have the capability to deliver.

And Andy, you recently worked as an Interim Chief Digital Officer for one of our clients. Now they chose to set that organisation up separately and have a separate role. So why did they do that? And why did they not set it up as part of the CIO's organisation?

It was deliberately chosen to be separate from IT in order to focus on value creation, thinking about the new products and new value streams they can bring for customers. In this organisation, the CIO was very focused internally on transformation, certainly not impossible to have digital as a section within IT, but you've got to really think about how you can set things up for success in your digital strategy within your particular organisation.