This is an excerpt from my interview with Jora Gill from the forthcoming Chief Digital Officer's Handbook. Jora is the new Chief Digital Officer of the Economist. The interview will appear in full with other digital though leaders in the forthcoming handbook.
Mark
Baker: That leads us into the next question
about whether you've had a situation with key stakeholders having different
perceptions of what should and shouldn't be done digitally and where
ultimately, these decisions lie?
Jora
Gill: I think each stakeholder, be it technology
marketing, sales, advertising, finance, have their own KPIs within,an
organisation and they are measured by these KPIs. So along comes digital disruption
that requires collaborations across departments. However the KPIs have not been
set across organisations but within each department so do not allow the
organization to collaborate and miss KPIs in one department for the sake of
another succeeding.
CIOs and CTOs are trapped in KPIs for example
other departments demand that they be more successful with projects not
experiment and fail and be rewarded for early failure, they must cut costs but
are not rewarded for new innovative products that increase profits as profits
do not sit within their departments, their departments are brought into
projects when the project has been decided and now costs are required rather
than a lean philosophy of building incrementally to customer needs. CIOs are in
that unenviable position of knowing what’s wrong and often what to do about it
but are often not empowered to make radical decisions across the
organization…did I mention Kodak and Blockbuster?
So the question should be "How can we
collaborate throughout an organisation where we deliver to customer value ?”
Mark
Baker: Can you give details of case studies from
your past experience.
Jora
Gill: Yes
we at The Economist have collaborated across departments and looked at the
customer journey when purchasing new subscriptions or one offs through our
eCommerce systems. However we took the journey from start to end with lots of
‘what ifs’ built in. We therefore looked at our marketing systems, our sales
systems, our customer care systems, our billing systems. We took the journey of
a straightforward transaction, a complex transactions, a transactions where a
decision was taken not to proceed half way etc. etc.
We took all of these journeys as if we were
the customer and then we mapped all the systems against these journeys. What we
found was that the experience was great when straightforward but difficult when
complicated. We then looked at the best of breed systems across the above areas
and mapped them, once integrated, across these journeys and found a much better and lower touch point
experience. We are now implementing a new solution that will provide our
customers with a greater experience when interacting with us.
Mark
Baker: So you have a process to get the answer.
Jora
Gill: It's a process of starting with an
assumptions then experiment with it and then based on those experiments and the
data (feedback loop), going back to our assumption board and ask "Was our
assumption and experiment correct, if yes great carry on?" or "If no
it wasn't. Do we throw the whole thing away or modify slightly?" If we
decide to do something slightly or radically different, we then experiment
again and then go back again to the data. "Were we correct this time?"
Look at firms, where did Twitter start?
They didn't come up with the idea of Twitter on day one and built the company.
They pivoted a number of times before landing on an assumption that was correct
and the rest is history.. What about Facebook, Groupon, Link-In…? All the same
they experimented and experimented until they had the right formulae. Their
strategies evolved over a number of years
Mark
Baker: Okay, so again, moving nicely on from
that. What sort of changes do you expect to see over the next two years and
then contrasting that over the next 10 years. In other words, short-term and
long-term. How do they...?
Jora
Gill: Within the digital space.
Mark
Baker: Yes, yes. Within the domain of a CDO.
Jora
Gill: Within the domain of a CDO.
Mark
Baker: Which is quite a broad domain, so...
Jora
Gill: Yeah. I think within the next two years,
we'll have established the CDO as a role with a defined purpose.
Mark
Baker: Is that going to be a permanent thing?
Are they going to be permanent CDOs and are there going to be CDOs in ten
years' time?
Jora
Gill: I think there will and the reason I think
there will be because I don't think digital's going to disappear in the next
two to ten years' time so irrespective
of the exact job title, there will be somebody who's responsible for digital
and enhancing a digital strategy. Now, I don't think one person or one
department will be creating all the digital ideas. I think these will be
multifaceted but one person will be responsible for bringing together a digital
strategy and also executing on that strategy. I don't think it'll be a five
year strategy, I think it'll be a six month to three year strategy and as I
said early, you'll be pivoting or preserving more often but I think within the
next two years, people instead of talking about digital and not really knowing
what digital is, will have defined what they mean by a digital strategy.
A lot of organisations currently want a CDO
but they haven't all answered the basic question of why and what is success
when we have the CDO ? I think at the moment, it is a trend to say "We
need to be digital and we need a Chief Digital Officer for us to be
digital." but they haven't quite defined what being digital is and what the
success criteria are. Each organization is different so there is not a single
digital blueprint.
I think over the next ten years, disruption
will be a constant and if organisations have not figured out what makes them
digitally valuable to their customers, then ultimately they're going to fail.
If they are slow or unable to react to digital disruptors then they are
ultimately going to fail. If they are not a digital disruptor themselves then
ultimately they are going to fail.
Mark
Baker: I think that's a very good vision for the
ten years actually and you've actually covered the next question quite well
which is what happens to those who don't transform efficiently. Do you think
any of them will stay here on or...when I say efficiently, some of them, it may
just be that their vision of digital isn't as...or far reaching. We've got
digital. We have a website. We have e-mail.
Jora
Gill: I think it depends on your industry.
Within the media industry, we've been massively disrupted by digital and
reacted to it. I think if you're a logistics company, you can take advantage of
digital but if you're a really good logistics company, you're still going to be
a really good logistics company that uses digital where it brings advantage in
ten years'
Digital is more than producing an app it is
thinking differently and looking at your company differently like a disruptor
would. If you can do this then you should be OK . . . . .
Read more of this interview and others like it from digital thought leader look out for the forthcoming Chief Digital Officer Handbook
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