Every Organization Needs a Digital Platform Strategy
Businesses around the world plan digital investments and every industry has experienced the impact of the digital operating model. What many businesses have yet to realize is that this is just the beginning. Businesses need to partner in digital ecosystems. This raises technology, organizational and leadership challenges for CIOs.
Gartner recommendation: to fully appreciate the opportunity of these ecosystems, CIOs must develop an effective digital platform strategy that embraces both the IT and business sides of the organization. CIOs must collaborate with their business counterparts to integrate digital platform development into their technology and business strategic planning.
Read an excerpt of the Gartner report “Every Organization Needs a Digital Platform Strategy” below or register to read the full report.
Every Organization Needs a Digital Platform Strategy Gartner predicts that, by 2020, more than 30 billion devices will be connected to the internet. The advent of digital business expands and evolves the opportunities, threats and constraints of leveraging a business ecosystem. A digital business ecosystem is a marketplace of functions and information. This network construct involves multiple value forms exchanged for the benefit of all participants.
Business ecosystems can help organizations:
- Develop and sell products
- Complement existing services and capabilities
- Optimize and enhance business operations
A survey of leading enterprise architecture (EA) practitioners shows that 58% of organizations directly influence their ecosystems, while 33% collaborate across their ecosystems as needed. Many successful new business models, including Alibaba, Uber and Amazon, leverage the ecosystem as a key component of their business and technology strategies.
Traditional businesses are also transforming their business models. According to a 2016 Gartner survey of CIOs, the typical CIO whose organization is participating in a digital ecosystem, expects that the number of their partners to more than double over the next two years.
To engage and manage business ecosystems, organizations are creating and integrating with a digital business platform to share critical assets. A digital platform is a business-driven framework that allows a community of partners, providers and customers to share and enhance digital processes and capabilities or to extend them for mutual benefit. This framework allows for different combinations of business models, leadership, talent, delivery and IT infrastructure platforms that power digital business ecosystems.
Not every organization should or will assume a leadership role in a business ecosystem; however, every organization will need a digital platform strategy:
- Some organizations will develop digital platforms to create a platform business model that encompasses providers, consumers and employees and/or facilitates the creation or exchange of goods, services and social interaction (see "Three Styles of Digital Business Platforms").
- Others will integrate with other organizations' digital platforms to engage with their platform business models.
To fully appreciate the opportunity of these ecosystems, CIOs must develop an effective digital platform strategy that embraces both the IT and business sides of the organization.
Register to read the full report
Source: Gartner, Every Organization Needs a Digital Platform Strategy, Betsy Burton, et al, 12 October 2016.