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The business has embarked on its digital transformation journey. As CIO, you are being relied on to help triage what is most important – initiatives that will move the needle to achieve and fulfill the digital goals and ambitions of the organization.

If selection criteria are not identified and well defined, then digital initiatives risk being misprioritized or, worse yet, incorrectly labelled as having high ROI.
Like any other project, net-new digital initiatives must be triaged according to the value they bring to the organization.
Just as importantly, the complexity of each initiative must also be weighed as a critical factor of success.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Once the scope of the digital strategy and its goals are finalized, the heavy lifting begins. CIOs must prepare for this change by evaluating opportunities and prioritizing which will become digital initiatives.

Impact and Result

By using an appropriate selection process, CIOs can prioritize the digital initiatives that will matter most to the organization and drive business value.

Select and Prioritize Digital Initiatives Research & Tools

1. Select and Prioritize Digital Initiatives Storyboard – A step-by-step document that walks you through how to prepare an IT department to embrace innovation and support the organization’s digital initiatives.

Part of Info-Tech’s seven-phase approach for aligning IT with the business’ digital strategy, this deck focuses the core and enabling initiatives that define IT’s innovation goals. By the end of this deck, the IT leader will have a roadmap of prioritized initiatives that enable the organization’s digital business initiatives.

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Select and Prioritize Digital Initiatives

Build your digital investment business case.

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Key Concepts

Digital initiative

A project – or a group of interdependent projects – whose primary purpose is to enable digital technologies and/or digital business models. These technologies and models may be net new to the organization, or they may be existing ones that are optimized and improved by the initiative itself.

The feasibility of any initiative is gauged by answering:

What amount of return on investment (ROI) or value does it bring to the organization?
What level of complexity does it pose to project execution?
To what extent does it solve a problem or leverage an opportunity?
To what degree is it aligned with digital business goals?

Digital strategy

The plan to deploy existing/emerging technologies to look at developing new products and services, new business models, and operational efficiency to meet or exceed performance targets.

IT strategy

The plan for deploying and maintaining applications, hardware, infrastructure, and IT services that support the business goals in a secure/regulatory-compliant manner to ensure reliability.

Digital transformation

Digital transformation is an at-scale change program – planned and executed over a finite time period – with the aspiration of creating material and sustainable improvement in the performance of an organization. Techniques include deploying a programmatic approach to innovation along with enabling technologies, capabilities, and practices that drive efficiency and create new products, markets, and business models.

Your Challenge

Once the scope of the digital strategy and its goals are finalized, the heavy lifting begins.
The CIO must prepare for this change by evaluating opportunities and prioritizing which will become digital initiatives.
But where to start with prioritization? What should the selection criteria be?
To answer these all-important questions, the CIO must identify what success actually looks like.

Common Obstacles

If selection criteria are not identified and well-defined, then digital initiatives risk being neglected or worse yet, incorrectly labelled as having high ROI.
Like any other project, net-new digital initiatives must be triaged according to the value they bring to the organization.
Just as importantly, the complexity of each initiative must also be weighed as a critical factor of success.

Solution

Determine and set your selection criteria by leveraging the matrix provided in this deck.
Evaluate each proposed initiative against this repeatable process in order to test your assumptions.
Develop a business case for each high priority digital initiative that captures its benefits and business value.
Assemble your prioritized list of digital initiatives to present to stakeholders.

Info-Tech Insight

Analyst Perspective

Prioritization follows ideation, and it’s not always easy.

Your stakeholders have spent considerable time and effort identifying and articulating a digital business strategy. Now that ideas have turned into opportunities, the CIO must prioritize those opportunities as actual initiatives. Where to begin?

Your first task is to identify the criteria that will be used to conduct prioritization activities. These criteria should be immutable and rigorously applied.

Your second task will be to develop business cases for each opportunity that passes muster. But don’t worry, you won’t need an MBA to get the job done properly.

Ross Armstrong

Principal Research Director
Info-Tech Research Group

Info-Tech’s digital transformation journey

By now, you have established your current strategic context

You have reviewed trends to reimagine the future of your industry and undertaken a digital maturity assessment to validate your business objectives and innovation goals. Now you need to evolve the current scope of your digital vision and opportunities.

Phase 1.1: Industry Trends Report
Phase 1.2: Digital Maturity Assessment
Phase 2.1: Zero In on Business Objectives

By this point you have leveraged industry roundtables to better understand the art of the possible – exploring global trends, shifts in market forces or industry, customer needs, emerging technologies, and economic forecasts and creating opportunities out of these disruptions.

In Phase 2.1, you identified your business and innovation goals and documented your current capabilities, prioritized for transformation.

Business and innovation goals have been established through stakeholder interviews and business document review.

Current capabilities have been prioritized for transformation and heat mapped.

You have also formalized your digital strategy

Throughout the course of Phase 2.2, you identified new digital opportunities, identified the business capabilities required to capitalize those opportunities, and updated the digital goals of your organization, accordingly.

An example of a formalized digital strategy from Phase 2.2.

The end result of this exercise is a new goals cascade that aligns digital goals and capabilities with those of the business. Digital initiatives were also identified but not yet selected or prioritized for execution at the project level.

Now you will select and prioritize digital initiatives

The goal of this phase is to ensure that initiatives that are green-lit for execution have been successfully assessed against your chosen criteria and that the business case for each initiative is firmly established and documented.

Info-Tech’s digital transformation journey for industry members.

There are three key activities outlined here that describe the actions that can be undertaken by industry members to help select and prioritize digital initiatives for the business.