What is a digital strategy?

It is a high level plan to set the direction and scope of an organisation over the long term to operate in the digital space.  It is really about carrying out business over the internet.  It is part of a corporate overall strategy.

Look at digital as another channel alongside other channels - newsprint for newspapers, stores for retailers, tv for video.  And while digital today is perceived by many to be about social media marketing (industry immaturity), social media is but only one avenue of digitisation.  Another misconception is a focus on IT, probably because the first adopters are tech startups.  If you think digitisation is about tech, your plans will be flawed.  Take a holistic view if you want to execute a digital strategy effectively.  [Digital strategy is itself part of the overall corporate strategy.]

Most websites today is v1.0, designed with principles from the pre-dot.com crash days (2000) and is mostly read-only. Website 2.0 today should be engagement based, in a digital era, to converse with customers and would-be customers ie. from passive to active. They should also be UX designed, not graphics designed to appeal to internal management.  And managed under business development, not IT.

A digital strategy is about digitisation and digitisation is the application of a digital strategy, crafting a plan, based on a corporate objective, around the appropriate internet business model, taking into consideration specific rules and executing it using the right digital techniques and tools.  Since digitisation is about engaging the outside - customers, would-be customers, partners, would-be partners, external experts, public – outreach is integral to the plan.  The organisation can use either private (eg. email, blog) or public channels to do this.  Social media is in this context a public channel and IT, an enabler.

The framework provides a guide to create a digital strategy.

                    of internet business models, rules, methods & tools of digitisatoin

In summary, a digital strategy is needed when an organisation wants to use the internet for business, alongside existing means.  The digital strategy considers internet business models, new rules of doing business, methods and tools to execute the plans in the digital space, alongside conventional means.

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To apply digitisation, externalisation is something managers need to know of.  Digitisation is about engaging the outside (customers, would-be customers, consumers, partners) to meet a business objective.

The community model, one method of engagement, a way to execute crowdsourcing initiatives