Designed for (Digital) Customers

New and powerful digital technologies are good for business in many ways. Going digital can certainly help organizations to market better their products and services. Yet digital is at its most transformative when organizations use it not to sell but to solve customer problems.

In the new book Designed for Digital, out this week from MIT Press, Jeanne Ross and her coauthors unroll a blueprint for digital success created for executives at established companies.  Digital business design is not about restructuring or about IT architecture, though both are important.

Designed for Digital emphasizes the creation and cultivation of five essential building blocks, including a digital platform that permits a company to configure offerings rapidly and an accountability framework that balances individual and team autonomy with alignment to organizational goals.

“I think it’s important to focus on the capabilities of technologies rather than the technologies themselves,” says Ross, Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research.

Digital technologies, she says, “give us ubiquitous data, which basically means there is nothing we can’t know. When we’re trying to imagine what we can do for customers, we should start with the premise that, if there’s something we need to know, as long as we have a value proposition, we can find a way to get that data. It’s ubiquitous,” she tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

“The second thing is we have unlimited connectivity. And that means not only can we get that data, but we can get it as it happens, as things occur. And we can resolve issues, we can distribute new information pretty much instantaneously, because we have IoT and we have mobility, so there is a way to react to the data and the analysis that we can do.

“Finally, we have massive processing power. Because of that, we won’t be overwhelmed by our data. We can take it. We can process it. This is why AI is a real possibility now.”