MIT Researcher Dr. Westerman: You Need a Strategy for the Digital Era

Dr. George Westerman, a Principal Research Scientist with the MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy, wrote an interesting article “Your Company Doesn’t Need a Digital Strategy”, published by MIT Sloan Management Review on its 2018 Spring issue. As Westerman writes “…. the focus on technology can steer the conversation in a dangerous direction. Because when it comes to digital transformation, digital is not the answer. Transformation is….In the digital world, a strategic focus on digital sends the wrong message. Creating a “digital strategy” can focus the organization in ways that don’t capture the true value of digital transformation. You don’t need a digital strategy. You need a better strategy, enabled by digital” Technology by itself don’t bring value. The value they bring comes from the ability of organizations to do business differently, more effectively or optimizing the value in the eyes of the customer. As he writes ” Analytics is not about databases and machine language algorithms — it’s about understanding customers better, or optimizing maintenance processes, or helping doctors diagnose cancer more accurately. IoT is not about RFID tags — it’s about radically synchronizing operations or changing business models”. Here is the link to the article. In our book “Doing Digital” we referred to this article in chapter 3 paragraph 11 and emphasized how important it is for the organization to understand that digital technologies are enabling technologies and enable the business to reimagine and rethink the way they do the business.