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New digital technologies present both game-changing opportunities for—and existential threats to—companies whose success was built in the pre-digital economy. This article describes our findings from a study of 25 companies that were embarking on digital transformation journeys. We identified two digital strategies—customer engagement and digitized solutions—that provide direction for a digital transformation. Two technology-enabled assets are essential for executing those strategies: an operational backbone and a digital services platform. We describe how a big old company can combine these elements to navigate its digital transformation.
The proliferation of convergence of digital technologies SMACIT (social, mobile, analytics, cloud, and Internet of Things) has created significant threats and opportunities to established companies. Business leaders must rethink their business strategies and develop what we refer to as a digital strategy. Our research shows four keys to successfully defining and executing a digital strategy:
1. zeroing in on a customer engagement or digitized solutions strategy to guide the transformation, 2. building operational excellence, 3. creating a powerful digital services backbone to facilitate rapid innovation and responsiveness, and 4. ensuring ongoing organizational redesign. A list of publications from the research is provided at the end of this document.
The digital economy poses existential threats to — and game-changing opportunities for — companies that were successful in the pre-digital economy. What will distinguish those companies that successfully transform from those that become historical footnotes? This is the question a group of six researchers and consultants from Boston Consulting Group set out to examine. The team conducted in-depth interviews with senior executives at twenty-seven companies in different industries to explore the strategies and organizational initiatives they relied on to seize the opportunities associated with new, readily accessible digital technologies. This paper summarizes findings from this research and offers recommendations to business leaders responsible for digital business success.
In 2023, Salesforce was the provider of the CRM system with the biggest market share. Besides providing a CRM software product, the company also offered an external developer platform called Salesforce Platform. Salesforce Platform enabled CRM customers to customize their CRM system and allowed partners (third-party developers) to develop cloud apps that could be distributed via Salesforce’s AppExchange marketplace. Since its official launch in 2008, Salesforce Platform had become a major revenue contributor for the company, including from over 7,000 apps in AppExchange.
Building a successful platform business extended far beyond building a technology platform to nurturing an entire ecosystem around it. Based on interviews with twelve executives, this case study illustrates what it takes for a product company to build a platform business—developing and scaling the business model, engineering the technology platform, growing a vivid community of developers, and marketing and selling the platform—and how Salesforce addressed related challenges.
