Competition is different
This different environment, he argued, requires a fundamental shift in the way businesses think and approach their own growth strategy – encompassing how they feel about
other businesses in their market and how they see themselves as a competitive entity. Making that shift can lead to a number of collaboration and bottom line benefits.
"[Success] will start...when you find one, two, three, four [businesses] coming together and...everyone is doing what's most important to them."
Process is different
For Jeremy Keane, a hospital and healthcare expert who was previously Managing Director at Generation Health, a health consulting service with over 300 employees, moving from analogue to digital required getting the right people in the room at the right time to ensure the thinking wasn’t just replicating inefficiencies in their analogue process.
"There's probably two major components of our business that are focused on this: one is a people and performance division and the other's the IT division,” Keane says.
"People in performance are focused on the relevant procedural requirements for each service we deliver [and] adhering to procedure is very important to ensure we're clinically compliant, but also we're compliant with the regulatory authorities.
"[So we got] people in performance speaking with the IT division to [identify] what solution we can put in place to eradicate some of these somewhat archaic processes of utilising faxes and waiting a week or so for a response."
Rethinking the way they operate has seen significant benefits for the business. The average time saved according to Keane is around 30-45 minutes per case. With the business working through 4000 to 5000 cases each year, the savings add up to a conservative 2000 hours of work time every year.
What's valuable is different
The other thing the digital environment changes is what's valuable in the eyes of business. Michael Ackland, Telstra’s Group Executive for Consumer and Small Business writes, “These days, it’s all about cloud storage, data networks and IP phones, and high-quality hardware and software built for business.”
Change is the reality of the digital age, and it looks unlikely to slow down anytime soon. In order to maximise the promises of the technology, it's important to take a moment and reconsider your business, and the strategic planning process that drives it, right from the beginning.
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