What is digital business development?

Today, there are many opportunities for businesses to develop their operations digitally, but skills differ in companies large and small. By highlighting the digital business development concept and what it involves, Nordlo seeks to help your organisation gain a better understanding of the way to achieve greater business value.

In a nutshell, digital business development means streamlining processes and business models with the aid of digital tools. There are three watchwords in the field that best describe our offering. Making fundamental change is about creating value for your business by gathering data or information that can be useful. This might involve an IT consultant observing your business and noting that certain processes could be automated instead of being handled manually. Automation can make a business more efficient. This in turn could lead to your finding ways of streamlining processes and business models.

Creating a business case for a digital strategy is essential for IT decision-makers

Today, there are unfortunately far too many companies that choose to digitise a specific function instead of all of the business’s processes. If we instead create conditions for digitising processes, it can help the technology get closer to employees and the organisation. Thus the most important thing an IT decision-maker can do is to create a business case for a digital strategy.

There are many clear examples of companies that have succeeded in creating business value by becoming more data driven. In retail there are systems based on purchasing data that facilitate purchasing processes, and which handle lists of goods automatically. The systems help achieve cost effectiveness and allocate resources to the right place. In this context we also talk about just-in-time deliveries, which is a good example of how a supply chain can be improved with the aid of collected data.

In the manufacturing industry orders and deliveries are automated, which increases productivity as employees can work with more complicated assignments and leave repetitive work to computers.

Businesses that integrate digital technology perform better

To succeed in gaining greater understanding of how to make use of data, we must first bring IT and business closer together. Thus it's important for IT managers to devote resources to increase the level of skills within the organisation. A publication by the International Institute for Management Development from 2021, shows that businesses which integrate digital technology in day-to-day work performed best financially, and that they are characterised as the leaders in knowledge and training in their field.

Most Nordic businesses do not have the ability to maintain sufficient skills in-house for the knowledge that is essential, and therefore they need external assistance. Nordlo has experts who can help your organisation develop and find ways to solve the challenges you face. Read more about digital business development in our report.

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