How Digital Is Your Business?
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $5.99
-
- $5.99
Publisher Description
The biggest, most important issue in business today--becoming digital--touches not only traditional enterprises but the most avant-garde of Internet companies as well.
Old-economy companies must take steps to avoid becoming victims of capitalism's creative destruction, the unofficial system that flushes out the old to make way for the new. For dot-com companies the question is whether or not they are flash-in-the-pan businesses with no long-term prospects of profitability and customer loyalty.
Most of the early efforts to answer the question "How digital is your business?" have been shrouded in techno-speak: a veritable Tower of Babel unconnected with the real needs of business. Slywotzky and Morrison show, first of all, that becoming digital is not about any of the following: having a great Web site, setting up a separate e-business, having next-generation software, or wiring your workforce.
What they so creatively demonstrate is that a digital business is one whose strategic options have been transformed--and significantly broadened--by the use of digital technologies. A digital business has strategic differentiation, a business model that creates and captures profits in new ways and develops powerful new value propositions for customers and talent. Above all, a digital business is one that is unique.
How Digital Is Your Business? is a groundbreaking book with universal appeal for everyone in the business world. It offers:
* Profiles of the future: the in-depth story of the digital pioneers--Dell Computer, Charles Schwab, Cisco Systems, Cemex.
* Insight into how to change a traditional enterprise into a digital business: the stories of GE and IBM.
* An analysis of the profitable dot-coms: AOL, Yahoo!, and eBay.
While How Digital Is Your Business? has great stories and case studies, its most invaluable central idea is that of digital business design and the array of powerful digital tools it offers for use in creating a digital future for your own company.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Slywotzky and Morrison, management consultants and authors of The Profit Zone, return with guidance for companies that will increase their competitiveness and profitability by integrating the most appropriate technology into their strategic business design. Their concept, dubbed "Digital Business Design," is "not about technology for its own sake; it's about serving customers, creating unique value propositions, leveraging talent, radically improving productivity and increasing profits. It's about using digital options to craft a business model that is not only superior, but unique." The companies that demonstrate the best DBD, they argue, are those that focus on business issues firstDand then determine how technology can maximize their business. The authors guide readers through a series of fundamental questions, with numerous examples of companies (Charles Schwab, GE, Cisco) that have successfully employed the DBD concept. Key to DBD is a "choiceboard," an "interactive on-line system that allows individual customers to design their own products and services." The best example of a company using choiceboards to increase a customer base, claim Slywotzky and Morrison, is Dell, whose customers can go online and select from an array of options to "custom make" their own computer system. For an increasingly global and digital market, Slywotzky and Morrison lay out a clear and cogent recipe for increased competitiveness and profitability.
