Digital Transformation Payday

CHAPTER 6Reactants/Scope: Make Sure Your Investments End Up Transforming Your Core

As visible from all practitioners' and academics' work so far, there is some agreement that the core of your firm needs to be the ultimate reactant in the scope for any digital transformation to matter at scale. Without transforming the core, you will most certainly end up just digital‐washing your company at the edges of your business with an operating model without a strategy and transformation for sustainable success. Still, this does not mean that this scope decision could not be a necessary and winning strategy from a portfolio perspective if there is clarity that your core business is in any way going to be disrupted beyond salvation. Other than prescriptive advice, there is no common structure for further breaking down the scope (what we call the reactants in our framework), in terms of relevance and digital transformation payday acceleration or deceleration.

To make this dimension of digital transformation more tangible, I find it to be very helpful to cluster the potential reactants in a simple two‐by‐two scope matrix as sketched in Figure 6.1. One axis defines whether you focus on your existing, incremental, or new markets and customers; the other decides whether you leverage existing, incremental, or new products and relevant assets. Depending on how far you go in each of these dimensions, you either transform:

• The core of your business, the heart of your current business model and ...