How Digital Is Your Business?

Slywotzky and Morrison, management consultants and authors of The Profit Zone, return with guidance for companies that will increase their competitiveness and profitability by integrating the most appropriate technology into their strategic business design. Their concept, dubbed ""Digital Business Design,"" is ""not about technology for its own sake; it's about serving customers, creating unique value propositions, leveraging talent, radically improving productivity and increasing profits. It's about using digital options to craft a business model that is not only superior, but unique."" The companies that demonstrate the best DBD, they argue, are those that focus on business issues firstDand then determine how technology can maximize their business. The authors guide readers through a series of fundamental questions, with numerous examples of companies (Charles Schwab, GE, Cisco) that have successfully employed the DBD concept. Key to DBD is a ""choiceboard,"" an ""interactive on-line system that allows individual customers to design their own products and services."" The best example of a company using choiceboards to increase a customer base, claim Slywotzky and Morrison, is Dell, whose customers can go online and select from an array of options to ""custom make"" their own computer system. For an increasingly global and digital market, Slywotzky and Morrison lay out a clear and cogent recipe for increased competitiveness and profitability. (Nov.)