Four Strategies For Executives To Enhance Digital Enterprise Effectiveness

A digital strategy that leverages the best that modern online technology and infrastructure can offer is essential if established businesses are to remain competitive. If they can't implement digital and cloud properly, they're going to have their lunches eaten by agile startups.

The vast majority of executives understand this — a digital strategy is necessary for future success. It's concerning, therefore, that few have managed to translate their high hopes for the digital enterprise into concrete strategies that materialize the real-world benefits of digital and cloud. According to a recent report from McKinsey, executives are falling short where digital enterprise is concerned. They expect great things: 71% percent reported that they expected digital to increase top-line revenues, but many also feel that their organizations are failing to live up to the potential that digital offers.

Before we look at what executives can do to enhance their organization's digital value capture, it's worth thinking about what digital enterprise is. The digital enterprise can be described as a combination of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud . Social is an important part of digital, but I'd like to focus on the other three aspects: mobile, analytics, and cloud. Mobile and analytics are inextricably linked to the cloud, so in large part, leveraging digital is about the effective use of cloud infrastructure and the capabilities it provides for mobile, analytics, and agile infrastructure deployment.

If organizations are failing to reap the benefits of digital, what can executives do to improve things?