12 Jun 2015
Three digital oversights that can damage your bottom line
Extract - the full article is online at http://www.information-age.com
There are a few common pitfalls most business make when it comes to managing their digital operations
We live in a global digital economy where consumers can (and do) access over a billion websites, on an ever-widening variety of devices, and maintaining a range of digital outlets is the lifeblood of modern business. As such, the battleground for customers now firmly focuses on who can offer the best digital experience. Indeed, companies that deliver exceptional digital experiences outperform the stock market by a factor of three, while those who do not deliver have lost 34% of market value over the past five years.
Yet while resources in terms of time, money and people have been allocated to help drive digital growth, the same cannot be said of digital operations management. However, efficient digital operation management directly supports effective digital customer experience.
If overlooked, poor management of digital operations can, and will, lead to a myriad of costly issues, including putting reputations severely at risk. This happens when organisations fail to join the dots and see clear, actionable ways to implement digital operations management strategies.
Encouragingly, we are beginning to see a shift in perspective starting to occur. Organisations are beginning to wake up to the reality that there is now a real need to fulfil the potential of digital operations ensuring they are efficient, deliberate in practice and measurable in order to maintain and improve customer experience.
Developing a structured and actionable strategy for digital operations management is becoming a necessity. However, there are three key areas that are most commonly overlooked when implementing a digital operations programme. By ignoring these, companies risk losing their competitive edge.
Misunderstanding digital governance
Digital governance is a term that is increasingly being used in the marketplace. Yet while there is currently a lot of talk about this topic, very few people are adopting an approach that exploits the insights that can result from monitoring adherence and compliance to digital governance. Many organisations will have now put in place policies and guidelines and even tools to assist with digital governance, however if these are not monitored then the effort made has been redundant.
For example, B2B sites are often the biggest channel for group level marketing. For any size of company, this is an outlet to be able to speak to journalists, customers, career finders and a multitude of different readers and it is essential that the material the user finds on the site is up to date and correct in order to maintain effectiveness and integrity as a leader within the industry that they are a part of.
Digital governance tools can be used to provide the safety net for B2B and corporate sites in monitoring that the messages they are intending to convey are on brand and accurate according to guidelines.
Even for the more digital governance aware organisations, data and report outputs from monitoring tools are often not understood or converted into actionable intelligence, leaving them with just a small fragment of the story.
There is a common misconception that digital governance is merely about who has the authority to add and remove content to websites and social media accounts, as well as having a chain of command in place to ensure no unauthorised activity takes place. Though this is key, having a roadmap that clearly defines roles and responsibilities for managing a digital presence is only one point in the triangle of governance.
Equally, if not more, important are monitoring that policies, standards and guidelines are being adhered to and then translating the resulting data combined with multi-sourced information into actionable and meaningful intelligence to continuously improve the digital presence and the management of the web estate.
What is absolutely vital in terms of driving change and achieving competitive advantage is recognising that governance is not just about implementing a framework to control digital processes, but realising the value of the information that implementing tools to monitor this can produce, and creating governance analytics to embed into the process.