A digital strategy consultancy can provide valuable support during your digital strategy journey. Let’s look at some of the key areas where they can make a big difference to your success.
Aligning internal stakeholders
A digital strategy consultant will help you create vital alignment on your digital strategy among internal stakeholders across your organisation. This may include C-suite executives, departmental leaders, team managers, and the wider workforce.
Even a small-scale digital project will impact a range of stakeholders—and for an enterprise- wide digital strategy, stakeholder alignment becomes far more complex. A good consultant will help you ensure that your stakeholders become enthusiastic enablers of the strategy, rather than resentful blockers to your progress.
The data, processes and infrastructure needed for your strategy will reside in multiple domains across the organisation, so gaining stakeholder confidence and commitment is essential. Stakeholders can also contribute specialist strengths from their functional areas, such as project management, financial planning and resourcing.
Achieving this stakeholder alignment may seem like a major effort in the short-term—but cross- organisational collaboration will make the longer-term implementation of your strategy much more achievable and successful.
Your consultant will help stakeholders to understand that your digital strategy is not just an IT initiative.
It is a business-critical activity that involves and benefits all of them—together with every other person and function in the organisation.
The consultant will understand the importance of involving stakeholders as early as possible in the process to gain their initial buy-in. Stakeholders
will value the chance to have a say in the digital strategy discussion, and to input on the organisation’s digital vision and roadmap. A consultant can also help you identify key stakeholders that you may not have considered, but whose involvement will be critical to your strategy’s success.
Your consultant will help you understand what motivates your stakeholders, and what they want from a digital strategy. They can also help you prioritise stakeholders in terms of their influence on the success of the strategy.
Understanding the needs of customers and users
Your organisation’s digital strategy must be based on how it enables you to better meet the needs of your customers. For a B2B organisation this can mean your external business customers. But it can also include your internal customers—employees that use the digital workplace tools and processes you provide.
Understanding the needs of these customers and users can be challenging. A digital strategy consultant can help you build a clear picture of these needs, through quantitative and qualitative research, interviews and surveys of users and customers.
The consultant may begin with a period of immersion in the user or customer environment to observe their needs, challenges and pain points first-hand. They give you valuable outside perspective on the real needs, helping you see with a user-focused and customer-centric lens.
The consultant will collect, collate and analyse data and feedback from these customer engagements, synthesising them into actionable insights that will inform your strategy development.
An expert consultant will apply a proven methodology to identifying customer needs such as the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework.
In this system, customer needs are analysed in terms of ‘jobs’—the objectives or outcomes that a customer wants to achieve. You can then identify the customer needs associated with each objective, and consider how best to meet those needs.
This approach enables the consultant to help you identify which needs of your customers are currently unmet—and potentially to find new customers with unmet needs that you are well positioned to serve in future.
