Five Moves to Become a Convergent Enterprise

Digital transformations that unlock uncommon growth are special. They require more than just adding on new digital capabilities or deploying new experiences, or even fielding new business models. Rather, organizations must work hard to converge these efforts around a singular purpose that is relevant to how customers live and work today – and find ways to satisfy their unmet needs.

1. Re-focus The Operating Model

Everything from talent, organization design, processes, interactions and tools should support the customer or employee experience that the company is trying to achieve. This means converging KPIs and measuring success in a way that ties the organization together in a shared commitment to customer outcomes.

2. Solve The Customer’s Actual Problem

Both internal and external-facing initiatives must embrace the evolved capabilities and new behaviors that customers and employees have today. The needs that your business was originally designed to address are likely being re-shaped by new capabilities that your customers are using. By pursuing new businesses at the intersection of what customers want and what they can already do with digital, firms will be able to address unmet needs in underexplored growth territories.

3. Reskill The Organization From the Top-Down

Investment in training for everyone from executive leadership to support staff will drive an enterprise-wide understanding of the software, tech and agile processes on which the business is built. Successful transformations are led by CEOs and executed teams who can connect strategy to implementation; orchestrate between new processes, new data and digital tools; and create impact.

4. Upgrade Your Go-to-Market Capabilities

Treat data as a renewable resource. Leverage marketing and sales functions to get closer to the customer and use always-on insights to enable a loyalty engine that not only drives preferences and new value props but also helps organizations anticipate shifts in demand.

5. Create Incentives for Innovation

Developing incentives for innovation throughout the company means rewarding test-and-learn, experimentation and calculated risk while tweaking funding models and time horizons to ensure that worthy investments are given a fair chance to succeed. No more short-termism or single-horizon thinking.

“Organizations must work hard to converge these efforts around a singular purpose that is relevant to how customers live and work today – and find ways to satisfy their needs.”

Getting Started:

Becoming a convergent enterprise is not quick or easy. We don’t expect every business will attempt it all at once. But, regardless of where you are in your transformation journey, we believe that every company has the ability to achieve convergence. The only requirement is a commitment to renewing purpose, shifting mindsets and aligning your priorities and pursuits. That starts with introspection.

Renewing your company’s purpose is not unique to digital transformation but because the digital environment has fundamentally transformed the way we live, it is a prerequisite for driving successful convergence.

Four Steps To Get Started

1. Assess the relevance of the business purpose to today’s customers, employees and stakeholders. 
   Begin by asking how context, competition and new capabilities have impacted your purpose. Has any part of it become outdated?
2. Map your existing digital transformation activities to convergent moves.
   Identify the gaps between the initiatives you’ve already invested in and those you should be investing in, to balance the portfolio of moves that are right for your organization.
3. Measure the change readiness of your organization. 
   Understand how proposed shifts in priorities will impact decision-making and ways of working – establish a team to help lead the transition.
4. Develop the convergence agenda to connect the convergent moves to an updated purpose.
   Use your renewed sense of purpose to prioritize the orchestration of effort.