How many major organisational changes has your company been through in the last five years, and did those changes create value? At MIT CISR, we studied over 700 companies to understand how companies unlock new digital value.1 We found that a company must perform organisational surgery, often reorganising many times to create the value. The top-performing companies in our research underwent, on average, 7.2 major organisational changes in the preceding five years, but the results were worth the disruption, as the companies grew well above their industry average.
We found that the companies in the top quartile of effectiveness at using these four levers were also top financial performers, growing at almost 12 percentage points above their industry average, and leaders in innovation, with 45 per cent of their annual revenue coming from new products introduced in the last three years. From the interviews, we learned that taking a top-executive perspective rather than a tech leader perspective can enable the kind of persistence, organisational buy-in, and change needed to unlock industry-leading digital value enterprise-wide.
In this paper, we describe the four levers and illustrate them with examples from companies including Standard Bank Group and ANZ, and discuss how to move from the technology-led governance to the enterprise-wide governance that is now needed to succeed.
THE FOUR LEVERS TO CREATE NEW DIGITAL VALUE
Historically, organising a company to maximise value from digital started with the technology leader looking out of the IT organisation to understand what the business needed. But in today’s world of technology everywhere, it’s time to take, first, a CEO perspective and, then, an enterprise-wide
