Strategy & Roadmap

Solving the digital and analytics scale-up challenge in consumer goods

| Charlie Ranalli

McKinsey argues that consumer-goods companies have invested in digital and analytics, but that more than half of the time those investments have failed to yied the desired results.

Their research shows that only 40 percent of consumer-goods companies that have made digital and analytics investments are achieving returns above the cost of capital. The rest are stuck in what the authors call “pilot purgatory,” eking out small wins but failing to make an enterprise-wide impact.

But digital leaders are showing they way – with four core elements leading to digital and analytics success:

  • Set a bold long-term aspiration
  • Pursue ‘domain transformations,’ not unrelated use cases
  • Ensure the coherence of enablers across domains
  • Reconfigure your operating model for speed and flexibility

Solving the digital and analytics scale-up challenge in consumer goods
Ford Halbardier, Brian Henstorf; Robert Levin and Aldo Rosales
McKinsey & Company, 2020

Why Software Is Eating the World

| Charlie Ranalli

Technology entrepreneur and Venture Investor Marc Andreessen masterful piece was published by the Wall Street Journal in 2011 and a decade later still feels fresh.
He made a compelling case that entire industries – from banking to agriculture – to are being upended by increasingly affordable cloud technology, broadband internet, the popularity of mobile devices, and smart software.

Why Software Is Eating the World
by Marc Andreessen
Cofounder and General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz

What’s Really Disrupting Business? It’s Not Technology

| Charlie Ranalli

Technology isn’t the main force hobbling many companies today—it’s changing customer needs and expectations.

Supporting and illustrating one of the two principles originating this blog that digital transformation is not about technology, marketing professor Thales Teixeira argues that successful disruptors are quicker to detect and cater to emerging customer needs than larger competitors, often with access to similar technologies and similar amounts of technology.

Mr. Teixeira discusses several cases of newcomers entering mature markets, and how incumbents reacted or adapted.

What’s Really Disrupting Business? It’s Not Technology
by Danielle Kost
Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, February 2019

See also: Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption

The Nine Elements of Digital Transformation

| Charlie Ranalli

Based on the research behind their pioneering paper The Digital Advantage: How digital leaders outperform their peers in every industry, George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, and Andrew McAfee of the MIT Center for Digital Business, identify the nine characteristics that differentiate digital leaders.

“The best companies — those we call Digirati — combine digital activity with strong leadership to turn technology into transformation. This is what we call Digital Maturity. Companies vary in their digital maturity, and those that are more mature outperform those that are not.”

Consistent with other research, leaders are digitally transforming three key areas of their business: customer experience, operational processes and business models, and each of the three pillars has three elements that are changing.

The Nine Elements of Digital Transformation
By George Westerman, Didier Bonnet, and Andrew McAfee
MIT Sloan Management Review, January 2014