Data and technology are indispensable strategic parts of the business activities of any organization. Technology is an integral part of final products or services, such as electronic banking, shops, cars, and consumer devices. Moreover, technology also ensures that new information and knowledge are derived from the large amount of data that we capture or acquire from external sources nowadays. 

Instead of entering data by a keyboard, more and more data are available via sensors: real-time and with high reliability. This creates opportunities for new services, but also for improvement of internal processes. The management focus shifts from the inside – ensuring proper control of technology resources – to the outside: how can we create more value for our customers through the use of data and technology?

What is this whitepaper about?

In this whitepaper we explain how an organization’s business should be the starting point for organizing data and technology. We discuss a number of common business challenges and explain how you can equip your organization to face them effectively. 

“Modalities of business activities are decisive for the effective and efficient organization of data and technology”

A media organization wants to increase their reach from 40% to 65% to increase subscriptions (B2C) and digital advertisement revenue (B2B). The shift towards becoming digital should be a core competence, but it is not. Product improvement and innovation are not good enough and lag behind customer expectations. Commercial and customer data is not available for campaigns. This leads to several data and technology pains for the board of the organization: existing processes and systems are unable to reach customers personally through broad corporate advertising across all media, apps do not support the development of new products, data is fragmented in personal systems, manual processes do not support the digital channel sufficiently. 

The main underlying cause for these pains appears to be a lack of business – technology alignment. The Chief Digital Officer of the media organization claims that not solving this will cause a significant delay in their digital acceleration. To quantify this he indicates that their yearly 15% growth in digital business will be reduced to 5% maximum, which comes down to a € 60M revenue pain (10% of 600M digital revenue) in the first year.