Strategic Transformation: Power your 2024 growth strategy with digital transformation

Autumn is already upon us, and for most companies this means more than just back-to-school & the return of Starbucks’ Pumpkin-Spice Coffee, it’s also time to roll-up virtual sleeves and begin 2024 Strategic Planning in earnest, including the challenges of translating these company aspirations into the detailed-budget realities necessary to action them. The uncertainties of the 2024 geo-political picture, the vast economic uncertainties already dogging the major economies of the World, as well as numerous industry-specific competitiveness factors all conspire to make 2024 a one of the most challenging planning horizons in current experience. Learning how to synchronize 2024 strategic planning with Digital Transformation is a crucial step for firms that seek to capitalize on benefitting from the power of digitalization in uncertain times like these. By combining 2024 Growth Strategy with the Digital Transformation steps necessary for it to succeed, ambitious firms can leverage Digital Transformation to  Inform Budget Plans, simplifying the detailed tactical interpretation of these objectives while maintaining the key connections between them. The result becomes a focused 2024 Strategic Transformation to power growth.

What Are the Connections Between Growth Strategy & Digital Transformation?

The Harvard Business School (HBS) teaches that “Business strategy is the strategic initiatives a company pursues to create value for the organization and its stakeholders and gain a competitive advantage in the market. This strategy is crucial to a company's success and is needed before any goods or services are produced or delivered.” The core concepts of value creation and competitive advantage are the beginning of the key to learning how to synchronize your 2024 Growth Strategy to Digital Transformation resulting in a focused Strategic Transformation Plan. The point of having strategic initiatives is to drive company wide thinking, decision making, prioritization and performance management, all toward delivery of the intended results. 

Likewise, Digital Transformation centers on the notion of integrating digital tools and methods seamlessly into every facet of an organization’s operations and activities in order to empower every member of the internal team, every external stakeholder, all ecosystem partners, and of course, customers (patients, clients, subscribers, etc.), to interact at digital speed, with high confidence in all the data, appropriate transparency, and compliant security. A simple summary of the connections between Growth Strategy and Digital Transformation can thus be summarized in this way:

Strategy Defines:

• What Constitutes Value Creation?
• What Constitutes Competitive Advantage?
• What are the OKRs Sought?
  (Objectives and Key Results)

Digital Transformation Delivers

• New Methods of Digital Service Delivery
• Data-driven Insights into “Value Created”
• Eliminates Process-Friction
• Builds Process-Transparency
• Digitally-facilitated Marketplaces
• Accelerated Product/Service Development
• Mass-Personalization to CustomersMarket
• Competitive Analytics
• Digital-enablement of Specific Metrics that track & define the Objectives
• Digital-enablement of Specific Key Results 

Let’s review some examples of growth strategy synchronization with Digital Transformation to help clarify these points:

Growth Strategy and Strategic Transformation In Healthcare

In the Healthcare space, on the Value Creation track, the ability to facilitate highly scalable telemedicine visits for a host of diagnosis and treatment specialties has become critically important. Removing the familiar obstacles to convenient patient engagement and operational scale which plague traditional clinic-central operations is a classic Digital Transformation outcome that instantly creates value for the patient population, and many tangential benefits operationally, and competitively at the same time. As observed by NIH: National Center for Biotechnology Information “In the complex and articulated panorama of e-health, telemedicine certainly represents one of the key strategic tools to support and improve numerous care processes. For many of these processes, distance is a critical factor for access to care.” (Telemedicine as a Strategic Tool to Enhance the Effectiveness of Care Processes: Technological and Regulatory Evolution over the Past Two Decades) 

The massive scope of Digital Transformation in Healthcare was recently highlighted in this this Global Market analysis by Future Markets Insights, Inc. published by Global Newswire on May 2, 2023 with the title “Global Digital Transformation in Healthcare Market is Estimated to Cross US$ 253.6 Billion, Rising at a CAGR of 14.5%”.  FMI further states “Digital health has become an increasingly prevalent buzzword due to the increasing implementation of digital health platforms such as telehealth, mobile health, and other wireless technologies across healthcare facilities and nursing homes that provide patients with real-time medical treatment.” 

3 Major Trends in Healthcare Strategic Transformation Driving Growth into 2024

For further forward-looking context, these three trends are already creating dramatic change, and copious opportunities, in a growth-oriented healthcare market environment:

• The Consumerization of Healthcare‍
  Consumers have taken center stage in the marketing and delivery of many forms of health and wellness treatments and their demand for convenience, accessibility, transparency and personalization have begun to significantly alter the landscape of the entire industry. In May 2023, McKinsey published an article (Driving growth through consumer centricity in healthcare) in which they observed “Making the changes needed to become more consumer-centric is incredibly difficult for healthcare companies, given core industry dynamics and a rapidly evolving care and coverage landscape. However, a large majority of industry executives acknowledge its importance.”
  
  The prevalence of “Wearables”, from Smart Watches to wristbands, and even health-data gathering finger rings has begun to substantially drive the consumerization of healthcare, starting from the fitness/wellness domain and quickly branching into every form of ‘remote diagnostics’ now possible given the mass-instrumentation of such a large swath of the health-conscious public. These consumers also, obviously, tend to have access to all the mechanisms of traditional healthcare (insurance, hospitals, clinics and specialists of every type), but it is the immediacy and direct personal control of the data and digitally-facilitated care experience that represents the largest projectable growth vector for the industry now.
  

(Source: https://rockhealth.com/ )‍

• The Focus on Value-Based Care (VBC)‍
  Beyond making care accessible, attractive and relevant to a growing number of new patients, every healthcare growth strategy for 2024 needs to effectively address the continuing debates surrounding VBC. Many models have emerged in the last decade, yet the difference between the ‘Value’ of Prevention versus the ‘Value’ of Care-delivery cost reductions remains an open question. The AAMC Research and Action Institute published their study on the topic of VBC Models, to compare and contrast ideals and results. the graph below exemplifies the possibilities from a Healthcare Cost-Savings perspective. The data demonstrates the huge magnitude of impact that VBC may offer but specifics of the Practice must be taken into deep consideration:

Source: Net savings for CMMI value-based care models‍

• The Essential Nature of Big Data for Care Quality Gains‍
  The exponential growth in available data sources and the rapidly expanding power of Healthcare Analytics tools, in concert with AI and Machine Learning facilities, combine to form a new landscape for the valid and valuable application of Big Data to the many challenges of the Healthcare industry. Several areas of focus for such applications are receiving visibility, and funding support now:
  ‍
      1. Using data to substantiate ‘Evidence-Based Medicine’ and treatment efficacy
  ‍
      2. Analyzing data via AI/ML to detect and thwart Healthcare and benefits fraud
  ‍
      3. Correlating patient feedback & results to optimize care quality outcomes
  ‍
      4. Optimizing healthcare Operations & Supply Chains for efficiency & cost reduction
  

Clearly the need to power 2024 growth strategies with digital transformation is paramount in the global healthcare domain.

Growth Strategy and Strategic Transformation In Financial Services: Wealth Management example

Wealth Management Advisors are, of necessity, rapidly becoming familiar with a whole host of new Competitive Advantage opportunities emerging from Strategic Transformation as well. The integration of disparate systems in-house remains a very hot topic for most advisory practices even today e.g. CRM, Marketing Campaign Management and traditional Portfolio / Account Management have traditionally been isolated across multiple tools and datasets, often even across multiple external vendors. No crystal ball needed, by isolating the specific Data-Driven Insights that must be made accessible to achieve the desired strategic growth goal will naturally identify the specific Strategic Transformation deliverables to make it happen.

In its 2023 Market Survey and related analysis, Broadridge advises “Wealth firms are seeing tangible benefits from transformation and next-gen technologies, with a positive impact on their customers.”

‍Source: Broadridge.com

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‍Source: Broadridge.com

Regardless of the market of interest,  it should be obvious by now that your Strategic Transformation planning and actions must be directly synchronized with your pragmatic 2024 Growth Strategy.

We urge that this synchronization must begin by clearly prioritizing the specific outcomes required to enable the OKRs for growth that your firm aspires to achieve. It’s simple – and it begins with methodically unbundling the many competing strategic initiatives that nearly always put fog-on-the- field for budgeting, and then organize them into an ‘outcome criticality’ order. 

Build an Outcome Criticality Map

One easy tool to complicate the process of Synchronizing Your 2024 Strategy to your Digital Transformation plans involves creating a visual portrayal of the most critical outcomes being sought by Growth Strategy, and to be delivered with the help of Digital Transformation.  Some would call this a ‘Strategy Map’ and there are many approaches to this. We’ve found that staying focused on ‘Criticality’ of any given outcome is actually much more effective. Here’s a very simple, generic example to ponder for a moment. Let’s see what we can learn from this view.

Summary: 4 Key Steps to Consider Next

Here’s a quick guide to shed some light on the steps that can provide some clarity to connect the dots from Strategic Transformation Thinking to Tactical Plans that can be implemented.

1. Establish & Document the Most Critical Outcomes from your 2024 Strategic Transformation Plan
   a. This is where a set of OKRs can be invaluable
2. Create a Outcome-Criticality Map to reinforce meaningful 2024 Priorities
   a. Remember, a real Priority is a thing we’ll do ahead of (or instead of) other important things
3. Elaborate Each Critical-Outcome with its own simple Supporting Tactical Plan
   a. The value here is to surface ‘budget-worthy’ tactics, which may yield ‘2-birds, 1-stone’
4. Sum-Up these Multiple Tactical Plans into a Single Budget Roll-Up
   a. Generally, this facilitates a 2nd pass analysis of the tactical plans to weed-out the unnecessary spending and highlight the common Digital / Systems Investments required

Helping You Synchronize 2024 Strategic Planning with Digital Transformation 

While the high-level concepts we’ve addressed here are clear, we all recognize “The Devil’s In The Details”. Fortunately, Team Teach-Azur has significant experience in assisting ambitious enterprises and entrepreneurs, in both Healthcare and Financial Services, to gather and prioritize their objectives and find progressive ways by which to apply creative Digital Transformation tools and techniques to yield an actionable, measurable and ultimately, beneficial, 2024 Plan.

Contact us while you’re planning for your progressive 2024 objectives. We have the seasoned perspective, and digital transformation delivery capabilities that you can rely on for advice, support and solid deliverables that will ensure your Strategic Transformation success in the challenging year ahead.