There’s a wise saying that reminds us that time is money. This axiom is never more fitting than in today’s digital world.
At viax, we understand how critical it is to bring results to our clients’ business challenges as quickly and efficiently as possible. That’s why we assembled the tools to provide clients with quick-to-market enterprise commerce solutions.
Unlike legacy platforms with expensive infrastructure that can take years to roll out, our cloud-based subscriptions provide a full suite of modular commerce and OMS building blocks that integrate seamlessly with each other and with existing systems. By providing full and unrestricted access to our APIs, deploying new strategies or testing, new markets has never been more efficient. What’s more, with solutions built to work together, you have accessible data right away.
The viax model is unmistakably a boon for clients because it gives you the ability to get solutions to market quickly. But there’s another key advantage to our approach: It allows for an incremental approach to digital transformation, and specifically, a discovery-driven approach to planning.
The concept of discovery-driven planning was first co-developed by Columbia professor Rita McGrath in the 1990s as a strategic approach to product innovation through feedback and iterative change. Proving the model timeless, it’s also the topic of a feature article in the May/June 2020 Harvard Business Review, authored by none other than McGrath herself, and co-authored by Ryan McManus, a globally recognized leader in digital business models, transformation and ecosystems.
In the article, “Discover-Driven Digital Transformation,” the authors share case studies of companies that spent years working toward lofty and expensive goals, only to have them fail to meet the expectations of the business. They assert that companies would actually be “much better off taking a more incremental approach to transformation over time,” adding that while companies should always have a vision of where they want to go, they should work their way toward it by continually finding opportunities to digitize problematic processes in their core operations.
At its center, they assert, the discovery-driven model is a lower-cost process for quickly testing assumptions about what works, obtaining new information and minimizing risks. The approach can also provide efficient proofs of concept and help overcome potential barriers to digital transformation — winning early supporters and early adopters, as well as demonstrating clear impact on financial performance indicators.
At viax, we have seen this discovery-driven model implemented successfully firsthand among enterprise B2B and D2C clients. Among organizations that prioritize learning, testing and leveraging their corporate structures, many have tested new markets and opportunities before scaling enterprise-wide. Indeed, McGrath and McManus point out that existing, or incumbent, organizations could have a leg up implementing the discovery-driven model over new organizations, referencing the benefit of paying customers, financial resources, customer and market data, and larger talent pools. The key, the authors point out, is to build the solutions around these organizations to allow them to move quickly and demonstrate clear impact on financial performance indicators.
In contrast to this incremental model, the authors warn of the dangers of the more traditional software delivery approach. “Digital transformation is complex and requires new ways of approaching strategy. Starting big, spending a lot, and assuming you have all the information is likely to produce a full-on attack from corporate antibodies.”
Simply put: Products that require long, big-bang type delivery models rob the business of all that time to be learning and improving.
We all know that running the best tests are useless without an efficient way to capture and evaluate results. Likewise, the most valuable commodity for data is time: The sooner you start gathering data, the more precise your insight.
The viax architecture was designed from the ground up on modern data analysis capabilities to give our clients the unique ability to immediately collect actionable data on every single event across the entire cloud solution in one clean format. This real-time and comprehensive access to data drives better algorithms and yields more accurate analysis. In turn, clients benefit from opportunities to continuously learn, adapt and grow in response to data. In contrast, most other available systems today are cobbled together through years of acquisitions or seeking to translate data from three decades of monolithic “best practices.”
Have you spent years and invested countless resources on your team members? Use them! Over the last decade, we’ve all seen our share of outside agencies trying to evolve a line of business they know little about. Strategic partners who listen first and work with your team to explore and action on new ideas are great; those who claim to be able to lay out and deliver those strategies for you are likely setting you back. As we at viax have discovered and the authors echo: “If you put a team of people who know the customers on the job, you’ll stand a better chance of making your digital investment pay off.”
Software implementers should be strategic partners who can add knowledge and allow your organizations to advance your business goals, not a permanent silo of workers who are the only ones able to understand your technical systems or who hold your systems hostage to our infrastructure. Quite the contrary: The viax team and our partner network are focused on empowering our clients to bring the management of each solution in-house and using our cloud-based solution with fully accessible API. We based our architecture on commonly accepted languages and modern tools to put the power back into the hands of our clients and their teams so that you, our clients, can get the most out of viax. Our partners are there to teach and to augment, but never to become a necessity for your solution to function.
Digital transformation is much more than a buzzword or the topic of a consulting session — it’s woven into the DNA of the present and more important, will continue to shape the future. Tapping viax’s full suite of modular building blocks gives you immediate and comprehensive insight into your data, allowing viax to become a multiplier to your team’s ability to adapt and grow, so you’re well-poised for tomorrow. What’s powering the future of digital transformation? Well, that depends on what you’re learning today.
Reach out here to learn why we’re so passionate about powering the future of digital transformation and how we can help your company achieve data-driven digital transformation.