Digital Evolution: What Most Everyone Gets Wrong About Platform Decisions
While the procurement is focused on quadrants, waves, capabilities, and marketscapes, back in the world that IT and Digital leaders live in, it's not even just about the decision itself. It's about an organization adopting and executing its digital capabilities consistently in service of its business model and customers.
The platform is the least of the worries that a mid-market or Enterprise Digital leader has to focus on, and when it does become a worry, it is usually due to neglect.
Here are just a few concerns digital leaders face in evolving their results.
Your Company
These elements of your own company affect your platform decision. Please forget about the vendor for now.
Risk Profile
Some companies are more risk-averse than others. So unless a vendor is well-established with multiple references in their category, they will not even be considered regardless of the rest.
Financials
Your gross margins (people vastly underestimate the effect this has on a company's digital roadmap)
The structure of your IT budget (capex vs opex heavy)
Many companies don't have points of margin to give up to an unending list of SaaS vendors.
Your Issues and Goals
If you don't understand where you are and where you are going, there is no correct platform to choose.
You may select a popular platform that everyone trusts, but that doesn't help much if you can't get organized.
Your Ability to Execute
Very hard to succeed in a major digital platform evolution without great leadership and project management, managing up, taking one step at a time, and prioritizing. This takes great Product Management and Project Management. Forget what the requirements are, if you only get to step 1 of your 200-item roadmap before you give up, what have you accomplished?
Power Dynamics - Who is The "Architect"
In some companies, I have seen both legal, procurement, marketing and all other manner of departments other than IT function as de-facto digital architects. Not a formula for success.
Platform
What's easy to evaluate is if a company has a feature, or at least claims to have it. What's much more difficult to evaluate is does it work the way you think it does.
ISV Partners
What does not matter is how many applications are connected to a platform, particularly if you will only adopt 1 or 2 per year anyway.
What matters instead is your goals, and can you quickly show you can execute on them through the ISV partners you have selected.
As you move from SMB into Mid-Market and Enterprise, you realize your ideas about an "app stack" may have been flawed.
Agencies and Integrators
It's probably the most underestimated part of evolving a platform. Few organizations can manage an entire platform in-house; almost everyone must rely on one or more third parties with specialized expertise.
Your ability to evaluate these resources is critical.
Expert Consulting: How Will You Grow Your eCommerce Company?
When growth is elusive, I am an expert at asking incisive questions to surface the real issues and then present straightforward ideas that your team can actually implement.
Mistakes are expensive. They cost money, of course. What’s worse is the opportunity cost. I work with investors and management teams worldwide to help them get a handle on their digital business plans to execute a clear path forward.
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