Quickstart Digital Strategy

Explore a big picture view of digital strategy, clarify what it is and isn't, and examine how digital transformation applies strategy to your business while considering costs.

Understand how rapid digital technologies reshape business and customer interactions, and define digital strategy as a lens on the business strategy that applies information technology to help goals.

Explore how digital transformation integrates a digital strategy across internal operations, communications, decision making, and customer experience, driven by strategic choices rather than technology, with a holistic, whole business focus.

Explore the key elements of digital strategy, from customer focus and process optimization to information security and an innovation culture, to align technology with business goals.

Put the customer at the center to drive digital strategy across a multi-screen online presence, multi-channel marketing, and bi-directional customer interactions such as live chat and e-commerce.

Optimize business processes by building a flexible, responsive infrastructure with the right digital technologies. Leverage cloud computing, software as a service, automation, and analytics to increase efficiency and real-time insights.

Develop a proactive information security and privacy framework within digital strategy by implementing risk management, policies for data storage and access, cloud backups, secure payments, and physical security.

Explore how innovation turns customer demand into real business value by investing in people, clarifying priorities, and embedding digital, customer-centric processes through design thinking and roadmaps.

Review the key elements of digital strategy: customer focus, optimized processes, information security, and an innovation culture, and prepare to assess digital readiness on the path to digital maturity.

Assess your digital readiness to shape a digital strategy by focusing on customer focus, optimizing business processes, security, and innovation culture; optionally benchmark against competitors.

Assess your business's digital readiness with a digital audit to anchor a successful digital strategy. Identify gaps between current practices and futures where digital technologies improve efficiency.

Score key digital strategy elements from 1 to 10 to conduct a simple digital readiness audit, visualize relationships with a radar chart, and communicate digital maturity to stakeholders.

Benchmark against similar businesses to identify key tasks, aim to match or surpass competitors, and use an Excel dashboard to map gaps.

Assess your digital readiness with a simple digital audit to gauge digital maturity from beginner to professional, and consider competitive benchmarking to highlight gaps before creating a digital strategy.

Learn to create a digital strategy by defining purpose, vision, mission, and values, clarifying the business plan with a visual model, and developing smarter objectives and a digital action plan.

Digital technology is changing faster than ever, reshaping business. Learn how digital strategy acts as a roadmap, applying information technology to support the business strategy—not IT, marketing, or a model.

Define your purpose and why you exist, then articulate vision, mission, and values. Build goals and an action plan through the strategy pyramid.

Clarify the business planning using a lean, one-page business model canvas that captures value proposition, customer segments, channels, relationships, revenue streams, resources, partners, activities, and costs.

Define the difference between goals and objectives and show how qualitative goals become measurable objectives within a digital strategy, highlighting customer focus, process optimization, security, and innovation culture.

Apply the smarter objectives framework—specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time bounded, extendible, rewarding—aligned with the business plan and digital action plan. Test objectives for clarity and outcomes.

Develop a digital action plan by aligning smart digital objectives with business strategy, enabling real-time customer interactions, targeted marketing, and cloud-enabled processes to raise digital maturity.

Develop a digital strategy by defining purpose, using the strategy pyramid and business model canvas to set smart objectives and link digital goals to business goals, including evaluating digital suppliers.

Explore how to evaluate digital suppliers, including types of digital suppliers and examples such as evaluating software developers and digital markets, and learn negotiation tactics for win-win partnerships.

Identify digital suppliers to outsource web, marketing, support, software as a service, cloud, and hardware needs, and learn how to evaluate providers across key dimensions.

Assess software as a service providers using a baseline checklist of security, backups, uptime, SLAs, and API risk. Evaluate integration, customization, scalability, cost, and third-party risk to guide selection.

Explore how to evaluate software developers for a quickstart digital strategy, using criteria such as experience, project management, development processes, staffing policies, QA, pricing, and social proof.

Learn to evaluate a digital marketing consultant using criteria like industry experience, project management, core services (search engine optimization, content marketing, social marketing, analytics, marketing automation), pricing, and social proof.

Negotiate with digital suppliers by setting clear objectives, building the right team, and pursuing win-win deals that balance price, value, delivery, and long-term relationships.

Evaluate digital supplies and outsourcing options, including SaaS, software developers, and digital marketers, then negotiate with suppliers using trials and RFPs to enable digital transformation and change management.

Learn how to implement digital transformation through change management, from defining the process to communicating plans with change canvases and checklists that engage customers and partners.

Apply your digital strategy to your business to drive holistic transformation across internal operations and the customer experience. Prioritize strategy over technology by defining goals, vision, and change management.

Harness change management to drive digital transformation by communicating clearly, empowering employees, and aligning processes, focusing on customer experience and delivering small wins before big projects.

Explore the phases of change management from analysis to performance review and identify psychological barriers to adoption and communication needs. Learn models for unfreezing behaviors, planning, implementing, and sustaining change.

Discover practical change management tools to assess employees, map talent in a quadrant of potential and performance, analyze stakeholders, and tailor communication, motivation, and training for successful change projects.

Learn practical planning techniques and implementation methods for managing change projects with active leadership, clear vision, comprehensive communication, and a systematic approach to overcome resistance.

Use change checklists to define roles, communication, training, and impact on structures and processes; monitor status, align with business and digital strategy, and secure top-management support for effective transformation.

Master how to implement digital transformation through change management, addressing the psychology of change, planning and rolling out initiatives with canvases and checklists to foster a culture of innovation.

Cultivate a culture of innovation by implementing a clear process for generating and assessing ideas, shaping them into useful products within a digital, customer-centric strategy.

Define innovation as something new with customer demand, and analyze radical, incremental, and routine innovation across product, service, processes, and strategy, considering societal impact.

Discover how ideas become market innovations by comparing four-phase, five-phase, and stage-gate models that cover idea generation, development, prototyping, and launch.

Identify ideas from internal and external sources using creativity methods like scamper, then open up innovation through a funnel that feeds evaluation, development, and market insights.

Explore qualitative and quantitative methods to assess ideas with strategic fit, risk, and market potential, and prioritize through portfolio analysis and rapid prototyping.

Explore push and pull innovation strategies shaping digital strategy, balancing customer-driven pull with technology-driven push, and map market entry timing across pioneers and fast followers.

Discover how to cultivate a culture of innovation and connect digital resources internally and externally to drive a customer-centric, ecosystem-based process from idea generation to market-ready products and services.