Consider how entire industry verticals – media, payments, shopping, travel, hospitality, to name but a few – have been up-ended by new entrants successfully leveraging digital technologies. The results are new products and services that delight customers with unexpected experiences, surprising convenience and radically lower prices. And while industry vertical enterprise incumbents possess undeniable assets – customer base, brand loyalty, global reach, capital resources – the previous two decades have provided irrefutable evidence that such assets, by themselves, are insufficient barriers to disruptive “digital first” challengers.
In response, enterprise incumbents have the opportunity to not just defend their businesses but to lead their industries. To do so, they must transform into digital enterprises. These organizations embrace digital technologies across the entire enterprise value chain, from products to customer retention to supply chain integration to organizational agility. In doing so, they unleash their assets to serve their customers with the innovation and agility of a “digital first” new entrant...
