Digital technologies provide powerful new channels for reaching customers, but they also carry greater risks of failure, writes SiliconAngle Media Research Director Peter Burris. Planning digital projects invokes expectations from executives in sales, marketing, product management, service and fulfillment.

Burris argues that successful digital planning requires a framework that starts with three questions:

• What should we do differently?
• Who are we going to do it with?
• How are we going to do it better than anyone else, every time?

Context is vital for answering the first question. Understand how your digital initiatives will engage customers in unique and different ways. It is crucial to customer engagement. The “who” questions involve communities based on people connecting to do the same thing. The link between context and community is tight. The answer to the third question is defined by the customer engagement capabilities of the business. These can vary greatly from business to business, even in the same industry. It starts by defining the engagement capabilities the company wants to digitize.

The digital marketplace is challenging for traditional businesses. Customer engagement is not process-driven in the traditional sense of one correct way to do things. Digital markets are highly dynamic, requiring highly responsive capabilities.

In the full Professional Alert, available to Wikibon Premium subscribers, Burris discusses these issues in depth and provides the pieces that business leaders can use to create a framework for designing and prioritizing their digital business initiatives.

© 2016 SiliconAngle Media