The business has embarked on its digital transformation journey. As CIO, you are being relied on to help triage what is most important – initiatives that will move the needle to achieve and fulfill the digital goals and ambitions of the organization.
- If selection criteria are not identified and well defined, then digital initiatives risk being misprioritized or, worse yet, incorrectly labelled as having high ROI.
- Like any other project, net-new digital initiatives must be triaged according to the value they bring to the organization.
- Just as importantly, the complexity of each initiative must also be weighed as a critical factor of success.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
Once the scope of the digital strategy and its goals are finalized, the heavy lifting begins. CIOs must prepare for this change by evaluating opportunities and prioritizing which will become digital initiatives.
Impact and Result
By using an appropriate selection process, CIOs can prioritize the digital initiatives that will matter most to the organization and drive business value.
Select and Prioritize Digital Initiatives
Build your digital investment business case.
Info-Tech Research Group
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Key Concepts
Digital initiative
A project – or a group of interdependent projects – whose primary purpose is to enable digital technologies and/or digital business models. These technologies and models may be net new to the organization, or they may be existing ones that are optimized and improved by the initiative itself.
The feasibility of any initiative is gauged by answering:
- What amount of return on investment (ROI) or value does it bring to the organization?
- What level of complexity does it pose to project execution?
- To what extent does it solve a problem or leverage an opportunity?
- To what degree is it aligned with digital business goals?
Digital strategy
The plan to deploy existing/emerging technologies to look at developing new products and services, new business models, and operational efficiency to meet or exceed performance targets.
IT strategy
The plan for deploying and maintaining applications, hardware, infrastructure, and IT services that support the business goals in a secure/regulatory-compliant manner to ensure reliability.
Digital transformation
Digital transformation is an at-scale change program – planned and executed over a finite time period – with the aspiration of creating material and sustainable improvement in the performance of an organization. Techniques include deploying a programmatic approach to innovation along with enabling technologies, capabilities, and practices that drive efficiency and create new products, markets, and business models.
Your Challenge
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Common Obstacles
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Solution
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Info-Tech Insight
The business has embarked on its digital transformation journey. As CIO, you are being relied on to help triage what is most important – initiatives that will move the needle to achieve and fulfill the digital goals and ambitions of the organization.
Analyst Perspective
Prioritization follows ideation, and it’s not always easy.
![Ross Armstrong](png/rossarmstrong.png)
Your stakeholders have spent considerable time and effort identifying and articulating a digital business strategy. Now that ideas have turned into opportunities, the CIO must prioritize those opportunities as actual initiatives. Where to begin?
Your first task is to identify the criteria that will be used to conduct prioritization activities. These criteria should be immutable and rigorously applied.
Your second task will be to develop business cases for each opportunity that passes muster. But don’t worry, you won’t need an MBA to get the job done properly.
Ross Armstrong
Principal Research Director
Info-Tech Research Group
Info-Tech’s digital transformation journey
![Info-Tech’s digital transformation journey: 1 - Visualize the art of the digitally possible, 2 - Evolve your digital business strategy, 3 - Execute with confidence](png/digitaltransformationjourney.png)
![Info-Tech's digital transformation journey for industry members. Table shows the stakeholders, advisory support and deliverables for each industry members](png/digitaltransformationjourneyforindustrymembers.png)
By now, you have established your current strategic context
You have reviewed trends to reimagine the future of your industry and undertaken a digital maturity assessment to validate your business objectives and innovation goals. Now you need to evolve the current scope of your digital vision and opportunities.
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Phase 1.1: Industry Trends Report
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Phase 1.2: Digital Maturity Assessment
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Phase 2.1: Zero In on Business Objectives
By this point you have leveraged industry roundtables to better understand the art of the possible – exploring global trends, shifts in market forces or industry, customer needs, emerging technologies, and economic forecasts and creating opportunities out of these disruptions.
In Phase 2.1, you identified your business and innovation goals and documented your current capabilities, prioritized for transformation.
Business and innovation goals have been established through stakeholder interviews and business document review.
Current capabilities have been prioritized for transformation and heat mapped.
You have also formalized your digital strategy
Throughout the course of Phase 2.2, you identified new digital opportunities, identified the business capabilities required to capitalize those opportunities, and updated the digital goals of your organization, accordingly.
![An example of a formalized digital strategy from Phase 2.2.](png/formalizeddigitalstrategy.png)
The end result of this exercise is a new goals cascade that aligns digital goals and capabilities with those of the business. Digital initiatives were also identified but not yet selected or prioritized for execution at the project level.
Now you will select and prioritize digital initiatives
The goal of this phase is to ensure that initiatives that are green-lit for execution have been successfully assessed against your chosen criteria and that the business case for each initiative is firmly established and documented.
![Info-Tech’s digital transformation journey for industry members.](png/prioritizedigitalinitiatives.png)
There are three key activities outlined here that describe the actions that can be undertaken by industry members to help select and prioritize digital initiatives for the business.
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Identify your selection criteria
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Evaluate initiatives against criteria
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Determine a prioritized list of initiatives
Info-Tech’s approach
1 | Identify your selection criteria
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2 | Evaluate initiatives against criteria
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3 | Determine a prioritized list of initiatives
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Step 1: Identify Your Selection Criteria
Understand which conditions must be met in order to turn an opportunity into a digital initiative.
![Step 1: Identify Your Selection Criteria](png/step1.png)