Sheldon Anthony IO

Digital capabilities have become a core component of the modern company's culture. Businesses must incorporate digital capabilities across their organization if they want to stay competitive and keep up with the high pace of today's market. The digital capabilities incorporated in digital products and services today will allow organizations to be agile, capable, and responsive in the future. As technology transforms society and businesses, organizations must come up with new strategies to stay relevant, informed, and innovative. It's more about what digital capabilities are incorporated into an organization’s digital products and services, not just what business is digital.

1. Digital Myopia

   Digital myopia refers to the limitation in an organization's ability to perceive its digital capabilities and lack of focus on its long-term objectives. This narrow-minded approach can impede an organization's growth, hindering its ability to leverage digital technology and adapt to changing market dynamics. The root cause is usually a fixation on short-term goals that hamper strategic planning. Excessive focus on immediate metrics such as revenue, customer satisfaction, or cost-cutting measures leads to neglect of long-term objectives. Moreover, factors like a lack of internal digital talent, inadequate resources, communication gaps, and lack of alignment among stakeholders can contribute to this short-sighted approach. Allowing this to continue in your organization can result in an organization's inability to compete with rivals and you will usually see it having a sluggish growth trajectory. Organizations need to focus on delivering long-term digital objectives by adopting a future-ready approach to stay abreast of emerging trends and technological changes in the market.
   
   

2. Digital Value Chain Inertia

   Digital value chain inertia can be defined as a phenomenon that describes the difficulty or reluctance to completely shift business value capabilities from analog to digital. An end-to-end digital strategy is rare in most businesses, even as digital is everywhere in the value chain. Instead of waiting for the market to force us to completely shift, we need to be more proactive in focusing on providing digital capabilities. According to Sriram Narayan, it limits our ability to plan and execute market iterations of products and hurts business results in the process.^[1] He was talking in the context of business inertia but the same concept applies to digital value-chain inertia.
   
   

3. Familiarity Over Innovation

   In the digital world, we cannot expect our users to stick with the familiar especially if that familiar is not innovating, improving, and changing people's lives. Familiarity may be deeply ingrained in part of how people make all kinds of decisions and determinations. Being innovative means offering the new and with this newness comes unfamiliarity. It's this unfamiliarity that causes disruptions whether the consumer is aware of it or not. Once they get a hint of how it saves them time or improves their life and it is presented well, this is usually the surprise that disintermediates us from our users especially if it is left unattended for a long time and is providing continuous value unnoticed. Neglecting to innovate in the digital age can result in losing customers, declining profits, and ultimately, business failure.
   
   

Digital capabilities that enhance people's daily lives are the core of success in the digital world rather than the technologies selected and implemented. Digital capabilities will help companies remain nimble and reactive to changes in the market. While disruptive innovation can be hard to predict, many organizations have started to realize that a focus on providing digital capabilities is at the core of their success in the digital world.