Three tips for developing a digital strategy

Paul Whimpenny is Senior Officer for Digital Strategy at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), anagency that leads international efforts to defeat hunger. Its goal is to achieve food security for all and make sure that people have regular access to enough high-quality food to lead active, healthy lives. It has more than 194 member states and works in over 130 countries worldwide.

Our organization, like many others has been both inspired and slightly terrified at the same time by the emergence of new digital markets. From AirBnB to Spotify, we see how whole industries can be changed almost in the blink of an eye, sometimes triggering a rapid decline of more traditional industries.

In this article, I give three simple tips to keep in mind if you are embarking on developing a Digital Strategy for your organization.

Tip 1: Don’t forget that a Digital Strategy is not a revolution but an evolution of the traditional practice of developing an organizational IT Strategy. It is important not to be blinded by the digital hype, or believe that you need to recruit a brand new team with the word digital-this this or digital-that in the job titles before embarking on a Digital Strategy. Yes, it does need a more business focused approach and less IT-centric than a traditional strategy, and yes you do need to watch out for the next Uber in your industry, but fundamentally a digital strategy is an IT strategy applied to our times.

The opportunities may be greater to influence the direction of your organization, and the threats may be greater too, but the analytical skills you’ve used to develop strategies in the past still apply here. There is also time to grow them because the process of changing from IT to digital will take time.

In setting up the team to work on this, we simply identified three or four employees to work on the area of digital strategy. These were just regular staff, with diverse technical backgrounds, who we thought were flexible and motivated enough to be able to pick up a new role, especially one for which there are no standard training courses. This team was assigned full-time to this task, and that was essential, both to get up the learning curve quickly and to avoid distraction from unavoidable demands for operational support.

In preparing to write our Digital Strategy, we interviewed all the Senior Managers of the organization worldwide, around 40 people. These interviews concentrated on very traditional IT questions: business objectives, business capabilities needed and IT’s potential contribution to providing those capabilities.

This traditional approach was needed because trying to get busy senior managers up to speed on digital trends to the point where they could see the opportunities themselves did not seem feasible.

To get around this block, we distilled the disparate input from their interviews into a group of five themes. That allowed us to explain the Digital Strategy in terms of how we believed these themes could be addressed. We then ran two workshops to get business people to talk about specific themes, both to confirm some of our own conclusions and to give them some sense of ownership for the direction of the Digital Strategy.

Tip 2: Get ready to learn your business. OK, you are thinking, “Yeah, I know my business backwards,” but I’ve seen in my team that this knowledge can be very superficial.  Or it might be detailed knowledge about internal mechanisms while in reality the team is not in a position to understand and actively contribute to business direction.