Own Your Digital Strategy
Organizations should always own their own strategic goals and intent. That may seem like an obvious statement but, because digital is still a relatively new discipline in the enterprise, often there is no one in a senior position who is able to, or enabled to ensure that the organizational digital strategy is well defined and implemented. Organizations then might lean too heavily on resources outside of the organization, outsourcing strategy development and implementation—sometimes to the same vendor. This creates a situation where the vendor is tasked not only with digital strategy development but also with the responsibility of evaluating the business success. One danger in having a vendor doing both digital strategy development and evaluation of achieving specified business targets is that it sets up an inherent conflict of interest, since of course, they will want to say that what they are implementing is successful and meets business goal criteria. This doesn’t mean that a business should not leverage the expertise of external resources to support the development of its digital strategy. Trusted advisors and vendors of record will always be an integral part of getting work done in large organizations; but, organizations should always define and “own” their own digital strategy—the strategy that links business goals and success to their digital portfolio. If there is no one in place inside the business who can do so, then they should fix that strategic deficit by hiring the right resource(s) to fill the gap.