No, you don’t need a digital strategy.

To get straight to the point, of course you need a strategy that deals with digital. However, instead of declaring it a digital strategy, you should simply incorporate the digital changes into your corporate strategy. Read the following article to find out why.

(Reading time 4 minutes – English version here)

Digital is still far too often treated as a division, a channel, a discipline within a company. It is organized accordingly: With its own departments, its own staff and its own resources. This can sometimes lead to a situation that, on sober reflection, leaves you a little perplexed. For example, instead of setting up a separate eCommerce team, wouldn’t it be better to add eCommerce skills to the existing sales team (training or recruitment)? Or teach online skills to the existing marketing team instead of setting up a separate online marketing team? The formation of such islands is extremely dangerous for the development of a company because it creates “management debt”. It encourages different cultures in the teams, different customer services and unnecessary friction between the traditional and future-oriented business models.

Where does that come from?

Such a development begins with the strategic considerations of a company. These are usually long-term and old-economy in nature. Over time, it became apparent that customer behavior was changing. They suddenly want to do a lot of things digitally. That they have a lot of information that makes their lives easier. Instead of resuming the strategy process as quickly as possible and adapting the corporate strategy, a digital strategy was (and unfortunately still is) quickly defined. This strategy is then implemented as an appendix (usually with a budget that is woefully too low or too high) and lo and behold, suddenly it is quite logical that there is a separate eCommerce team in the company. But that still doesn’t make it good.

The thing with the terms

Now,“digital strategy” is a term that doesn’t actually exist. Neither Wikipedia nor the dictionary list it. However, it is often used by consultants and among CEOs and CMOs. What I occasionally come across is that the digital strategy actually refers to the transformation strategy. In other words, a strategy paper that describes how to catch up in the digital sector.

What needs to be done?

The digital revolution is too comprehensive to be satisfied with a secondary strategy. It fundamentally affects almost all companies and is changing the success parameters of business models. I therefore argue that you should not develop a digital strategy, but rather revise your corporate strategy.

The digital aspects of your business belong in the corporate strategy.

If the behavior of your customers changes fundamentally, then the corporate strategy must also change fundamentally. It’s actually quite simple. Nevertheless, larger companies in particular find this difficult. This is hardly surprising: whereas previously 3-5 year strategies, and in some cases even 7 or 10 year strategies, were followed, it is now necessary to fundamentally revise the strategy every 18 months. It is the end customer, i.e. all of us, who set the pace, even if some act as if this were an uninfluenceable “phenomenon of our time”. We are the ones who demand more and more because we want to lead an increasingly comfortable life.

So I can only advise you to take a close look at your customers’ digital activities. Even details that at first glance seem insignificant. Incorporate these changes. Not because, as some consultants would have you believe, the entire business is at risk, but because enormous opportunities are opening up. You owe your company this kind of forward-looking attitude. What you call this strategy – corporate strategy, transformation strategy or, for my sake, digital strategy – is irrelevant to me. I am glad that you are addressing the issue at all.