How to Succeed in Digital Business by Trying

The Cloud Business Summit brought together more than 120 large-enterprise CIOs, CTOs, and senior business, marketing and finance leaders to explore how they are transforming their companies through Cloud-enabled digital business transformation.

One of the featured Strategy Panels at the Summit was entitled How to Succeed in Digital Business by Trying. With Digital Business now a top-tier CXO agenda item, business and IT leaders recognize that success demands fresh new thinking around core business processes, what is central to brand strategy, and what it takes to build an agile, innovative and winning digital business culture. Bill McNee, Founder and CEO at Saugatuck Technology, an ISG Business leads this panel, joined by Scott Henry, EVP and CIO, Madison Square Garden; Steve Hall, Partner, ISG; Ben Pring, Vice President, Co-Director, Center for the Future of Work Cognizant Technology Solutions; and Evangelos Simoudis, Managing Director at Corporate Innovation Ventures.

Some key takeaways from the panel include:

• Corporate leadership is overwhelmed by technologies: The proliferation of technologies that might be relevant to a given business is exploding. And the interconnectedness and dependency between them is making it very difficult for corporate leaders to make fully informed decisions and plans about their technology strategies.
• It’s all about the ecosystem: The dialog has changed in corporate IT from “How do I hire the talent?” to “How do I plug into the ecosystem?” Corporate leaders have realized that it is impossible to do all the technology in house, and fitting into and taking advantage of existing technology ecosystems is becoming increasingly important for success.
• Partners can provide the skills you need: Companies without the need to become part of these “innovation ecosystems” can still take advantage of new technologies through skilled partners. In many ways, leaders can choose between joining and contributing to an ecosystem or choosing partners that can provide the skills and talents that they need to succeed.
• Keep the “business” in digital business: New technologies still require a business case to warrant investment. But businesses need to protect nascent investments. There won’t always be a compelling business case up front, so it is worthwhile to create and invest in some ahead-of-the-curve technologies to be prepared. Experimentation with new models and technologies is a key part of succeeding in digital business.