How To Create A Digital Transformation Roadmap

Digital Strategy Roadmap

Only 33% of organizations successfully meet the challenge of digital disruption. Those that do tend to make big strategic bets—on the order of 10% of their market capitalization. They are rewarded with significant revenue growth and 14 extra points of total shareholder return. The critical question is this: which strategic bets should you make—and in what order?

Avoiding the Key Pitfalls of Digital Transformation

Most digital transformations start with high aspirations for a step change in performance. Yet most companies never realize those aspirations. They move through the three key phases of blueprinting the high-level strategy, activating the initiatives and minimum-viable products, and scaling across the organization—and they confront a reality that falls short of their hopes.

In our experience, much of this disappointment can be traced to insufficient rigor in defining the digital strategy during the first phase. Often organizations lack sharp insight on the key opportunities and threats.

How We Help Clients Create a Digital Strategy Roadmap

BCG's digital strategy model is designed to bring necessary rigor to the blueprinting phase. Each digital strategy roadmap engagement is customized to your situation and yields five essential deliverables that answer key questions:

Digital vision. How is digital changing your industry? What new offerings, operating models, and business models can it enable? What new rivals can it empower?
Competitive advantage assessment. How is digital affecting competitive advantage? Where are we well positioned? Where are we disadvantaged?
Prioritized list of digital bets. Which digital opportunities are consistent with your business strategy based on value potential—and with your ambition and capabilities? In what order should you pursue them?
Gap analysis. Based on your bets, what gaps in capabilities, organization, and systems need to be filled to win?
Transformation roadmap. What are the timelines, targets, and accountabilities for each of your programs? What moves are needed to fund the journey?

Together, these deliverables create a mutually-supportive and internally-consistent system of choices that embed digital strategy in business strategy—and tie execution tightly to both.

Our digital strategy consultants have worked with hundreds of companies to shape their digital strategies. The starting points varied. In some cases the focus was on providing a comprehensive roadmap for a full digital transformation. In others, the goal was to define a vision for—and a plan to pursue—the most attractive digital growth opportunities. And in still others, the mission was to get existing digital transformations back on track, developing a unified strategy to align disparate digital initiatives across divisions and functions.

Here are some examples of digital strategy work we have done:

Our digital strategy consultants helped this company explore a broad range of digital opportunities, align on a new digital business model vision, develop their data strategy, and devise a plan to address six capability gaps. Our work led to a major reallocation of investment, a reshaping of innovation priorities and process, and the company becoming a clear digital leader in its field.

Together with the company, our digital strategy consultants envisioned the future of the sector and translated this vision into a clear strategy, yielding a potential set of 50+ digitally-enabled use cases across their value chain. Through a strict prioritization exercise, we helped them select the top AI-driven use cases to pursue across four domains—marketing, sales, innovation, and support functions—and develop the investment strategy to "fund the journey." We also supported the launch of a global network of digital centers and accelerators to drive continuous digital innovation.

With our support, this company transformed from laggard to leader. Historically below-average in digital investment, we supported the development of an overarching digital transformation encompassing customer journeys, simplification, agile at scale, data and analytics, and IT platform replacement. We worked side by side with the client to ensure that the work was optimized for value, to accelerate deliverables and to build digital capabilities. The client is already generating significant EBITDA uplift, has new products and customer experiences in the market, and is progressing well towards full delivery.

Our digital strategy consultants helped bring strategic clarity to a wide range of digital efforts dispersed around this organization. We developed a digital strategy and identified priority digital initiatives that supported growth, reduced complexity, and delivered cost reduction. To help the client sustain its momentum, we helped establish global data, digital, and technology governance across both the new digital businesses and the core.

A Digital Transformation Leader

BCG was named a leader in digital transformation services by Forrester Research. Find out why in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Business Transformation Services, Q4 2020 report.

Flipping the Odds of Digital Transformation Success

Which Sectors Perform Best in Digital Transformation?

We explore why some sectors and segments have higher success rates than others.

Craft a Clear Integrated Strategy

To flip the odds of success in a digital transformation, you need to start with a strategy and set of goals that clearly define "success" for your company—and map out how to get there.