A digital strategy provides a roadmap for digital transformation by outlining investments in talents, processes, and customers to maximize competitive advantage. It specifies visions, actions, and tactics for becoming a digital business. Formulating a digital strategy involves three stages: defining value by gaining commitment, defining goals and investments; launching initiatives with light projects and assembling a digital team; and scaling up through organizing further initiatives, building capabilities, and adopting new operating models. A digital strategy guides a company's transformation through technology adoption and cultural shifts.

1. DIGITAL STRATEGY
Delineate a roadmap for your Digital Transformation
Digital Transformation

2. Intro.
A successful Digital Transformation must stand on a successful Digital Strategy as
its basis.
Essentially, Digital Strategy is about making wise investments into all aspects of
Digital Transformation, be it the talents, processes, or customers—with the end
goal of maximizing competitive advantage, profits, and ultimately growth that
companies expect when initiating their Digital Transformation. The concept of
Digital Strategy has changed fast. A couple of years ago, it was as simple thought as
“let’s build a website and an app, and it’s done”. But now Digital Strategy has grown
beyond that; it has become an integrated plan that does not only involve the
adoption and development of new technologies but also requires a shift in
business culture and coordination across the business.
While a Digital Strategy acts as a guiding star for Digital Transformation,
formulating it can inundate companies with even more problems rather than
solutions. The need for a well-defined digital strategy seems absolute, yet many
don’t know where to start, and others fail for a lot of pitfalls when compiling it.
If your company is in this same situation, this paper can help, where you find the
step-by-step guide to formulating a digital strategy.
Digital Strategy: Delineate a Roadmap for your Digital Transformation
01

3. Digital Strategy in the context
of Digital Transformation.
A Digital Strategy is comprehensive
plans for adopting new digital
technologies to achieve new business
outcomes, either by building new digital
products or digitizing the current
process. A Digital Strategy is the
roadmap for companies to become a
truly digital business and the foundation
for a successful Digital Transformation as
it specifies clear visions, actions, and
tactics that the company must adopt to
enable the necessary changes. A Digital
Strategy prompts changes in three major
dimensions: customer experience,
operational efficiency, and business
models. Formulating a digital strategy is
the starting point of the transformation
process, and ensures that the company is
using the right technology in a way that
supports the larger business objectives.
More often than not, a Digital Strategy is
a blind embrace of exciting technology
such as a new web site, new mobile
application or an AI technology.
Businesses can be distracted, attempts
to create strategy that includes as many
new technologies as possible. The
correct view of Digital strategy is a plan
of action designed to achieve business
goals via the implementation of digital
initiatives.
Part 1
Digital Strategy: Delineate a Roadmap for your Digital Transformation
02

4. Step-by-step Guide to
Digital Strategy.
Part 2
Digital Strategy: Delineate a Roadmap for your Digital Transformation
Acquire leaders’
commitmemt
Define goals
Acquire
investment
Begin with light-
house project
Assemble a
digital team
STAGE 1
DEFINING VALUE
Build a digital
culture
Organize digital
initiatives for
quick return
Build digital
capabilities
Adopt a new
operating model
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Re-organize to adopt
agile operations
STAGE 2
LAUNCH &
ACCELERATION
STAGE 3
SCALING UP
03

5. Digital Strategy: Delineate a Roadmap for your Digital Transformation
DEFINING VALUE
A company must place Digital Transformation
at the core of every initiative if they were to
set their digital strategy on the right course.
It’s no less important to predict how employ-
ees will react to this endeavor: will they go
along with the strategy or not? Or if they do go
along, would they be happy? To get everyone
onboard, the very first step is to show them
the value that Digital Transformation could
bring. A company knows it’s going in the right
direction if the commitment of senior leaders
is acquired, investments are carefully allocat-
ed, and clear goals are formulated.
Acquire leaders’ commitment
A digital strategy will be short-lived without
the commitment of the C-level and leadership
team. This may sound like a no-brainer since it
seems that the dedication of senior managers
is the solution to any project. However, com-
mitment is not the same thing as approval. In
other words, a C-executive’s job is not simply
nodding and signing to everything that is
proposed to him. Quite the contrary, leaders
must be the evangelist of Digital Transforma-
tion, who communicates clear visions and
objectives of the digital strategy. They
endorse the Digital Strategy as the top priority
across the organization: making other top
managers accountable, and making it impossi-
ble for employees to neglect the transforma-
tion.
Define goals
Major investments must be linked to clear
targets. This step has three aims. First, it
includes in the digital strategy the impact of
digital technologies once they are implement-
ed. Without such clear targets, leaders and
employees will find it difficult to accept that
the inefficient old ways are harmful and that
the new digital initiatives have the potential to
deliver new business outcomes. Second, by
imposing clear targets, a digital strategy can
prevent conflicts and opposition if the going
ever gets tough. Third, discipline and commit-
ment are enforced during the process of
implementing the digital strategy.
Targets can be categorized as primary and
secondary. Primary targets are high-level and
directly related to the benefits of sharehold-
ers. They are cost reduction, operational
efficiency, and customer experience. Second-
ary targets are more diverse, their goals are to
support the primary ones. They are the
frequency of each product release, the
percentage of processes that will be automat-
ed, the number of test cases that will be auto-
matically executed, and the degree of person-
alization that can be attained.
Acquire investment
A digital strategy will need to deploy substan-
tial investment. Typically, companies with
legacy systems will likely need to double their
spending and investment into IT in at least the
first five years of Digital Transformation. As a
result, investments related to Digital Transfor-
mation will lead to lower profits in the short
term. But they will bring major advantages in
the longer term. Knowing this will help greatly
in budgeting and planning for your digital
strategy.
04

6. Digital Strategy: Delineate a Roadmap for your Digital Transformation
LAUNCH &
ACCELERATION
Launching digital initiatives only accounts for
half of Digital Transformation. Keeping them
accelerated for lasting value is equally import-
ant. More than often, businesses implement
digital technologies only to see employees
reject them after some time, and the legacy
way of operating comes back.
To make sure that the efforts are invested and
momentum is built on a continuous basis, a
digital strategy needs to specify which initia-
tives to start first and the investments into
them with the internal and external resources.
Key enablers to launch the digital strategy
include a full-fledged digital team, a proper
organization structure, and a digital culture.
Begin with lightweight projects
To ensure the feasibility and profitability of
digital strategy, piloting is highly recommend-
ed. To pilot, companies should first launch
lightweight certain projects that provide
potential rewards and have manageable risk.
These projects can be the redesign of certain
small-scale processes or the adoption of
certain tools with low impacts on the current
state of the business.
Assemble a digital team
The digital team, typically under the manage-
ment of a CDO, will be the executor of the
Digital Transformation project. A digital team
contains cross-functional professionals that
gather different types of key expertises to get
Digital Transformation up and running. At this
stage, the digital strategy identifies all these
roles, their duties, and responsibilities.
The role of CDO cannot be overstated as
he/she will be the one who governs, facilitates,
and ensures communication for the team. In
addition, the CDO will determine the order of
the digital initiatives that need to be imple-
mented, supervise progress, and ensure that
the day-to-day tasks are executed as needed.
The other roles will vary depending on various
factors, which could be the unique goals of the
company or the sector it operates in. However,
there are certain critical roles: project manag-
er, digital architect, tester, business analyst,
data scientist, domain-specific expert, CX
expert.
Assembling the digital team can be a challenge
due to the competition in the talent market.
Most companies are still struggling to source
key professionals such as data scientists or
ML/AI engineers. One way is to hire a distin-
guished expert in the field, who will act as the
magnet attracting other talents.
Re-organize to adopt agile operations
How a company is organized largely deter-
mines the viability of its digital transformation.
However, reinventing an entire organization
seems unattainable. Considering that, compa-
nies can instead build an independent unit that
is dedicated to implementing the digital strat-
egy, such as the digital team. This digital unit is
responsible for not only the implementation
but also the promotion of new ways of work-
05

7. ing essential to Digital Transformation: agile
product development or test-and-learn men-
tality.
This dedicated unit can also aid in attracting
and retaining other experts, while encourag-
ing the like-minded colleagues to commit to
the strategy.
Nevertheless, building a separate digital team
does not necessarily solve the problems of
culture or talent. For example, if a company
chooses to hire new professionals altogether,
these people may neglect the values of the
current culture and systems. In turn, they can
lead to conflicts, especially if they fail to
convince the existing workers of the long-term
impact of digital strategy. One solution is to
onboard and integrate the digital unit with
care.
Mostly, it is highly advised to build a separate
unit for digital transformation that will culti-
vate a new way of operating that is contributo-
ry to success. This unit could include agile
methodologies and fail-fast mentality that
promote measurable progress while still
centering on customer’s benefits.
Build a digital culture
After a company has enabled the agile way of
working and built a digital team, it needs to
build an appropriate culture to nurture them.
This culture has certain defining characteris-
tics: a concentration on customer needs
instead of processes and cost reduction, an
adoption of agile methodologies, and a com-
mitment to continuous testing, learning, &
failing.
This isn’t to say that companies must discard
the traits that used to make companies
successful. It only means promoting new inno-
vations in parallel with modernizing their heri-
tage.
SCALING UP
Once it has launched and accelerated digital
initiatives, a company should have seen solid
progress after 18 months. Now, they need to
have other initiatives ready to maintain and
scale the value of Digital Transformation.
Organize digital initiatives for quick return
By roadmapping all the digital initiatives with
the goal to achieve quick return, companies
may have a higher chance to scale faster. The
more values a company can generate from the
digital strategy as it progresses, the more
scale and support it will achieve. Companies
can implement all the digital initiatives at once,
but this proves ineffective and also harmful to
resources. To ensure success, it is advised to
thoughtfully strategize for a manageable
number of digital initiatives over the long run.
Companies should put priority on initiatives
that (1) are strategically important, (2) provide
quick payback, and (3) offer solutions to
urgently complex problems. But it all depends.
Digital Strategy: Delineate a Roadmap for your Digital Transformation
06

8. Digital Strategy: Delineate a Roadmap for your Digital Transformation
Whether the company wants to apply new
ways of operating, adopt digital technologies,
or modernize legacy systems, and so on will
determine which initiatives to prioritize first.
All things considered, it is important to track
progress. Companies don’t need to stick to the
predefined goals; instead, they can adjust
targets over the course, depending on wheth-
er the prototypes offer greater and lesser
values than what has been forecast.
Build digital capabilities
To scale up their digital transformation, com-
panies must think beyond investing in digital
technologies. Digital Transformation is half
about technology and half about talents.
Sourcing new experts with digital skillset and
modernizing existing systems will be essential.
Most companies are still grappling with talent
recruitment: How could they find hundreds of
talents given that they are having difficulty
building a digital team of dozens? This search
for talent typically leads companies to
outsourcing to third-party software compa-
nies. Moreover, extensive training and knowl-
edge transfer will be necessary to get employ-
ees and also leaders familiar with the changes
that will take hold in the foreseeable future.
Finally, all people must change the way they
and the company operates since the ultimate
goal of digital transformation is company-wide
change.
Adopt a new operating model
Regardless of the structure of the company, its
digital transformation will mature until a point
where a thorough organizational reinvention
becomes vital. Silos have always been prevent-
ing companies from enhancing collaboration
and performance. In this digital age when
there’s a driving need to transform on the fly,
companies need to build a central platform
that integrates every part of its business
It then becomes imperative that companies
shift away from the silo-intensive business
structure to an agile, platform-based business
model that can break down all the boundaries.
This shift will enable a network business
model that has a laser focus on customer
values and operational efficiency. Ultimately,
an agile approach will become the norm.
07

9. Conclusion.
In our experience, top performers know that
their Digital Strategy must be as agile and
dynamic as the Digital Transformation that
the company is pursuing. They relentlessly
experiment with new ideas, develop new
products, source new talents, and adapt their
culture to keep up with the pace of Digital
Transformation.
Pioneers in digital transformation are those
that can take the most advantage of all the
economic changes brought about by the
digital era. They do so in these 3 ways: joining
the digital systems, building new digital offer-
ings, and transforming the business model.
Thanks to digital platforms, a new digital
workplace was created, data was disseminat-
ed across the company, and the network
effect was enabled. Once these factors
mature, digital platforms will create a digital
ecosystem where all industry barriers are
transcended, thus influencing the regional or
even global economy at large.
Digital Strategy: Delineate a Roadmap for your Digital Transformation

10. KMS Solutions works closely with leading software companies across the globe to
bring the most advanced and innovative technologies to Asia Pacific. The focus is to
help organizations achieve their business goals through world-class fit-for-purpose
solutions and proven industry best practices. KMS Solutions’ success is ultimately
measured by the positive impact that it makes to the client’s business.
To learn more about KMS Solutions, visit kms-solutions.asia