How to assess your organization’s digital innovation strategies
Two decades ago, W. S. Humphrey wrote in his book –Winning with Software– that “Every company is a software company”. I cannot agree more and want to underpin that all organizations need to start thinking, operating and innovating like a digital-first company, with software-technology at the heart of every interaction from customer acquisition to sales to retention to internal and external communication. It’s really you yourself thinking of your own future and your digital DNA as a company. Here is how we at Appnovation help you understand your digital innovation capabilities – and give you a starting point.
Besides creating digital products and running design-led workshops, my key role as a User Experience Manager at Appnovation is to understand other people’s businesses, the market they operate in, the competitive landscape and their key audiences that drive software usage, growth and sales. Being in this industry for almost two decades I have met and seen many businesses from inside and observed first hand, which teams have stronger and weaker digital adoption, creation and innovation cycles and capabilities.
Over the past 12 months, I have documented, formalized and tested my digital innovation assessment process together with my brilliant colleagues at Appnovation. In the following sections we will cover:
- What is a Digital Innovation Audit
- The benefits of a Digital Innovation Audit and why do it
- How do Digital Innovation Audits work
What is a Digital Innovation Audit
How employees think and use software-technologies within a business context is a really good indicator of a company’s innovation capabilities. The right technology in the right hands at the right place allows individuals to:
- Automate and speed-up many micro-processes
- Better connect with customers
- Share insights more effectively company-wide
- Faster adapt and respond to changes
Big companies always faced disruption, but now, the rate changed. Being Digital’ or ‘Born Digital’ is the mindset and culture employers need for (digital) innovation to thrive at speed inside the company, but – of course – not the only driver for constant improvement, as I will outline later in this article.
In a nutshell, we want to learn how you use technology to advance all areas inside and outside your business and where are the gaps we need to fill and can – with technology.
Our Digital Innovation Audit focuses on the implementation, adoption, usage and creation capabilities of software services, in the realm of your organization. In a nutshell, we want to learn how you use technology to advance all areas inside and outside your business and where are the gaps and opportunities, we can help you improve. In a way, we help you see what you currently do, what you should do and can do. We generally combine quantitative with qualitative research methods and follow this process:
- Key Stakeholder in-depth interviews
- A company-wide survey focused on behaviours and attitudes
- Contextual inquiries
- A Service-Blueprint exercise
- Analysis and reporting
The Benefits of a Digital Innovation Audit
The main purpose of a Digital Innovation Audit is to get an accurate picture of your current software-technology usage and understand the capabilities of inventing, building and shipping new software-technology. This could be anything from internal communication tools to complex client-facing e-commerce websites to AI-powered multi-sided platforms and mobile apps. We help executives and innovation managers avoid moving down the wrong innovation path; waste time, money and resources, while new startups and competitors take the lead.
What could you do more with the right technology at the right place, in the right hands?
As stated in one of my previous articles, focusing inwards and conducting proper in-house research has two main advantages:
- We all know that only research-based evidence drives innovation and eliminates opinions. In business, we’re trying to be right all the time and being rewarded for it. That often leads to ego powered innovation investments, process changes or products nobody wants or cannot build internally with the quality needed to succeed in the market. You probably heard at least one colleague saying “We need a mobile app for…”. But – do we really need it? Does it have to be a mobile app? Will someone even use it? How often? And what problems should the app solve? Can our teams support it?
- Research is inclusive and we listen to all employees within the company, which in return gives us a richer picture of your companies capacities, behavioural trends and hidden ‘side-projects’, that could often lead to great success stories. The process often empowers employees to become more autonomous and identify gaps and opportunities on their own.
How do Digital Innovation Audits work
Starting narrow first
Our audit is tailored to key industries, organizational structures and the products and services they offer, but we almost always start the research process with in-depth, semi-structured stakeholder interviews. In this 1 hour to 1.5 hours session we get insights and learn about these key areas:
- Technology maturity level
- Your value creation ‘chain’
- Past innovation projects and lean experiments
- Current innovation capabilities and innovation accounting
- Innovation culture, vision, roadmap, KPIs and OKRs
- Product & customer development process
- Forecasting and decision capabilities
- Digital business modelling & design thinking initiatives
- API strategy and partner network
We know that these areas are important; they drive organizational change and are influential in generating innovative ideas from inside your own company. Mixed in open-ended question help us to dive deeper to surface not only the WHAT and HOW, but also the WHY. During these interviews, we take post-it notes and craft affinity maps that help us organize these into groups or themes based on their relationships.
Going broad second
In the second phase, we accumulate more data points by sending out a quantitative survey to all regions and key departments within the company. The survey assembles a mix of open-ended and forced-choice questions to eliminate response bias. The goal here is to accumulate data that can be compared with the insights collected from the qualitative interview sessions held in phase 1.
In this phase, we also pick — on the basis of their survey inputs — four to six individuals, which we follow for a day to get a better sense of their daily routines and barriers they face. While we are doing this, we start to get a better understanding of your learning cycles. Learning cycles describe a timeframe individuals or teams gain crucial insights about the market, their customers or products, by crossing certain touch-points such as customer service centres or engaging in certain interactions such as talking to a customer directly to listing to their product experience.
Finding opportunities
Opportunities to improve people’s workflow, your organization's processes and perhaps even develop your own products exist all around us, in every team, company, industry and markets. This is because what is possible is always changing. New technologies are constantly emerging, new people with new talents join your company and competitors who challenge your status quo come and go.
Structure and tools for execution are not structure and tools for innovation. We all must be able to quickly evaluate opportunities to decide which innovations and ventures are promising and which are not, and for the ones that look promising, which ones should be pursued, which are best left for others, and which ideas are not ready for execution, just yet. Too often the process of deciding whether or not to change common behaviours or build a new product is left to intuition, executive ego or even worse, a powerful customer or partner sponsors an initiative that becomes the basis for all your efforts.
It always pays to conduct a week's worth of fast-paced research and develop an understanding where things are and where things should be. This is the reason why we offer our Digital Innovation Audit:
Help you find your digital DNA.
Need help kicking things off?
My talented colleagues at Appnovation and I would be delighted to start a conversation and guide you through our structured process. Talk to us.
