Opinion: Business planning, an escalating digital opportunity

You have dusted off last year’s business plan, held the obligatory team workshop, and tweaked your focus to ensure new financial year success. Finance is happy with the proposed budget, you have set goals and KPIs with your team, you know how you will increase customer satisfaction and employee engagement, and there’s even hope for market growth.

Your plan is awaiting management approval, but how did you go digitally?

If you have gone so far as to include a digital section within your business plan, which considers how you will digitalise every facet of your business to ensure maximum success, then you can stop reading here.

For many business executives, the extent of their focus within their business plan on digital may run as deep as “speak to IT about some new laptops for the managers”. Yet the power of digitalisation is such that it can quickly elevate your business to new levels and propel you up the corporate ladder quickly.

Just ask Apple, with its US$3 trillion valuation, about the power of digital.

You may have heard of all the buzz terms lately: generative AI, extended reality, haptics, quantum computing, distributed cloud, prescriptive analytics, hyper-automation and the metaverse.

You may have some people in your team that profess to be digital natives with a digital mindset who are capable of digital transformation. What has all this got to do with better business outcomes?

The good news is that you don’t need to know all about how these tools and approaches can make a difference. You just need to involve your digital-savvy team members in reconsidering a digital approach for your business. And it all starts with incorporating digital into your business plan.

Here are ten specific actions to consider that can augment your business plan with a digital approach:

1. Take a deep look at your slowest, most manual, business process. You know the one – it takes someone in your team (or in finance) days to collate data into Excel and then run a report from it. They take hours to tweak the data and make the report presentable. Ask your IT team how robotic process automation could speed it up.
2. Consider the map of your customer journey. The one marketing keep bothering you with. Ask the team how that journey could be provided via online tools, so your customers can engage with you digitally.
3. Ask HR how the annual employee engagement survey can be redeveloped into an always-on chatbot that polls the team on an ad hoc basis to capture their engagement and satisfaction levels and provides you with feedback on their sentiment throughout the year.
4. Find your closest data scientist and ask them how predictive analytics could bolster the value of your product and service by giving greater insights into how your business adds value to their business.
5. Ask your marketing team what they need to expand their SEO capabilities, content marketing and social media presence to generate more leads for your sales team.
6. Include a digital survey on customer experience in your product or service delivery process so you can capture NPS feedback and other success metrics on every customer interaction and have it automatically reported each week or month.
7. Unpack your IT costs in detail and work with the IT team to see if it would be more cost-effective and scalable to move some IT applications into a cloud-based environment.
8. Invest in training programs to enhance digital literacy and upskill your workforce. Encourage employees to stay updated with the latest industry trends and acquire new digital skills.
9. Appoint a project manager to learn about agile principles and methodologies to foster adaptability, flexibility, and quick response to market changes. Ask them to identify areas where agile practices could improve collaboration and productivity in your business.
10. Ask for help. Seek a digital strategy consultant with practical skills in business planning to review your business plan and add the digital touch to it. Their fees should be recovered swiftly by the return on investment their ideas generate.

Does your business plan already consider these types of ideas, or is there an opportunity to explore them? Your company may not be Apple (yet) but by outlining a few simple steps within your business plan you too can escalate your success this financial year by unleashing the power of digital.

Colin Dominish is the head of podium services at Lendlease Digital. He is a customer-first digital native with over thirty years of experience in bringing the best digital solutions and expertise from around the world and applying them to infrastructure projects.