Romain de Laubier
Managing Director & Partner
Tokyo
Only 33% of organizations successfully meet the challenge of digital disruption. Those that do tend to make big strategic bets—on the order of 10% of their market capitalization. They are rewarded with significant revenue growth and 14 extra points of total shareholder return. The critical question is this: which strategic bets should you make—and in what order?
The Digital Strategy Roadmap answers those questions in just 8-12 weeks—and sets you up for success by laying out the transformation plan, accountabilities, and metrics needed to ensure your results match your aspirations.
Most digital transformations start with high aspirations for a step change in performance. Yet most companies never realize those aspirations. They move through the three key phases of blueprinting the high-level strategy, activating the initiatives and minimum-viable products, and scaling across the organization—and they confront a reality that falls short of their hopes.
In our experience, much of this disappointment can be traced to insufficient rigor in defining the digital strategy during the first phase. Often organizations lack sharp insight on the key opportunities and threats. Some examples:
Without that strategic context, it’s easy to fall into the trap of setting small, siloed, and short-sighted ambitions—and level-funding a broad range of initiatives rather than doubling down on a few big, cross-functional, and critical ones.
BCG’s digital strategy model is designed to bring necessary rigor to the blueprinting phase. Each Digital Strategy Roadmap engagement is customized to your situation and yields five essential deliverables that answer key questions:
Together, these deliverables create a mutually-supportive and internally-consistent system of choices that embed digital strategy in business strategy—and tie execution tightly to both.
We have worked with hundreds of companies to shape their digital strategies. The starting points varied. In some cases the focus was on providing a comprehensive roadmap for a full digital transformation. In others, the goal was to define a vision for—and a plan to pursue—the most attractive digital growth opportunities. And in still others, the mission was to get existing digital transformations back on track, developing a unified strategy to align disparate digital initiatives across divisions and functions.
Here are some examples of digital strategy work we have done:
With so much at stake, why do so many companies fail?
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Three distinct waves of digital disruption are transforming strategy. Changing information economics enable new strategies—as well as radically new structures for businesses and industries.
