With digital transformation decades in, many companies face cluttered digital ecosystems that are out of sync with their business goals and incur high maintenance costs. Enter digital consolidation – an opportunity to streamline, optimize, and ensure your portfolio delivers value.
Digital transformation is a term that still enjoys much popularity in business and tech circles. However, the concept is nowhere near new – in most industries, digital transformation has been underway for years.
Ten years ago, most clients we were talking to were just beginning to dip their toes into the digital space, and today? Practically every organization we meet has not just an app but a collection of various digital solutions at their disposal, both customer-facing and those for internal use.
This is precisely where the problem lies. More and more, we are seeing companies’ digital ecosystems in less-than-ideal states. Sometimes, they own and maintain multiple products with overlapping purposes. Other times, the products have become misaligned with the needs of their customer base or don’t work in support of their business goals as they used to.
This is the reality of digital transformation a decade or two in. What comes next is the process of digital consolidation. Let us take you through it.
When digital transformation doesn’t go quite like you expected
Sometimes, the aftermath of digital transformation can look like those “expectations vs. reality” social media posts by people who’ve ordered products from dodgy online sellers. Ok, maybe less dramatic, but certainly not what they envisioned when they set out on this journey years ago.
Simply put, a company’s digital product portfolio is not providing the value it used to.
The reasons for this can be diverse. Maybe it was insufficient maintenance, a shift in business focus, failure to implement a long-term strategy, or processes like mergers and acquisitions, which resulted in a company “inheriting” a product they never set out to build.
This is nothing out of the ordinary, but when you notice that the current setup is not working for you anymore, it’s time to change it. Here’s what the symptoms can look like in practice:
Overlapping functionalities and product cannibalization
When digital products haven’t been built strategically, a company may end up with multiple solutions serving the same purpose and/or overlapping in functionalities. Besides this incurring unnecessary maintenance costs, it can also be confusing for the customers (Do they need to download all the apps? What does each one do?)
In more severe cases, often resulting from the above-mentioned mergers and acquisitions, there is a full functionality overlap, and products from the same company end up competing against each other, leaving fewer potential customers for each.
Bloated products
When features have been added on top of features for years, products can become bloated, prone to bugs, sluggish in performance, and more vulnerable to security threats. Not to mention, the situation doesn’t do the user experience any favors.
Growing maintenance costs
It’s simple math – more digital products mean more people working on them, more time required, more storage space, more infrastructure costs, more code to review, update, and keep safe, more everything. You could be allocating all these resources elsewhere – maybe on your next innovation project.
Technical debt
Sometimes, circumstances dictated a rush to delivery, and digital products have been built with no long-term perspective in mind. This has potentially led to the incurrence of technical debt – resulting in buggy software, slower development time, and difficulty implementing future changes.
Siloed product development
In large corporations with multiple branches across different locations, product teams may end up working independently on separate products without proper coordination. This lack of synchronization can lead to inefficiencies, duplicated efforts, and wasted resources.
Digital product consolidation to the rescue
In the logistics sector, product consolidation is about storing goods in a smart way so they can be shipped off with maximum space and cost savings. Similarly, digital consolidation is about optimally organizing what you already have in your digital portfolio. The idea is to do more with less.
When you don’t just look at your solutions one by one, but do a thorough review of your entire portfolio, you get a clearer picture of what can be improved.
An expert eye can help you identify areas of overlap, areas of lesser efficiency, or where the cost/benefit ratio isn’t working in your favor anymore.
CASE IN POINT #1
ALFA LAVAL
Digital landscape optimization for an industrial giant
Alfa Laval is a global force in industrial machinery, specializing in heat transfer, separation, and fluid handling. From high-speed fluid separators to ship ballast systems, Alfa Laval’s extensive range of equipment can be found in factories and vessels across the globe.
A few years ago, the company ventured into the IoT space, equipping its complex systems with sensors that collect mountains of data to optimize machine performance.
However, with separate systems across industries and locations, this valuable data remained siloed, failing to realize its full potential for efficient resource management.
Through our years-long partnership with Alfa Laval, we developed a unified platform now used by all their business units. A single, easily implementable design system and universal UI kit are now utilized across their global teams.
This initiative not only streamlined and optimized Alfa Laval’s digital landscape but also significantly reduced infrastructure costs by improving process oversight.
What does the process look like?
Phase 1: Taking inventory of the digital product portfolio
To help you get things in order, we must first understand your digital ecosystem. In this phase, we do stakeholder interviews, so we can learn when, why, and how you decided to build each product and what was its intended purpose.
On a more technical level, we will review your source code, app or system architecture, and your entire solution stack. We want to get to know your products inside and out.
Deliverable: A comprehensive report summarizing your current state.
Time frame: 2-4 weeks on average.
Quick win: You get an independent diagnosis of what you’re dealing with. Identifying the problem is the largest part of finding a solution.
Phase 2: In-depth portfolio analysis
Having identified the products and solutions you have at your disposal, we move on to examining their efficiency. Diving deep into your digital product portfolio, we look at things like infrastructure utilization, code quality, and security posture and analyze the interaction between the products you’re using.
We will also observe all of the above in the light of your business objectives. This phase revolves around discovering what produces results, and what doesn’t.
Deliverable: Recommendations and action points for your consolidation strategy.
Time frame: 3-6 weeks on average.
Quick win: Defining areas of improvement. You identify the low-hanging fruit in your consolidation strategy and can immediately start introducing improvements.
Phase 3: Consolidation strategy implementation
When we have identified what needs to be done, we can start making it a reality. Based on our findings, we define the priorities in your digital consolidation strategy and translate them into an actionable project roadmap. We kick off the project of reorganizing your digital ecosystem.
Deliverable: Recurring progress reports outlining the improvements in your organization after each project phase.
Time frame: 6-12 months, depending on the scope of the intervention, and applying an incremental approach based on the defined implementation milestones.
Win: This win is not quick, but it’s the ultimate one – a better-functioning, more efficient digital product portfolio.
CASE IN POINT #2
PHILIPS HOME ID
From disjointed companion apps to a unified platform
When we started working on the project in 2016, the Philips kitchen appliance digital ecosystem consisted of multiple mobile apps, one for each device type. In addition to enabling users to connect their airfryers, blenders, coffee machines, etc., and control them remotely, the apps also provided culinary content, i.e. recipes.
Managing several complex systems was becoming increasingly challenging for our client. The content had to be updated for each app separately, and they were dealing with high user segmentation, which left little space for cross-sale or cross-promotion.
Gradually, we built a single platform that connects multiple devices, allows users to find tips, recipes, and other home inspiration, and enables a singular experience across all Philips home devices.
Fast forward to 2024, the HomeID app has won multiple design awards, boasts over a million users, and features a scalable architecture ready for future growth.
Bonus outcome: business benefits that extend beyond your products
Digital products don’t live in isolation. They influence, and are influenced by, your business processes, organizational structure, and team setup. It is not uncommon that when we start to reorganize this space, changes ripple across your organization.
It’s quite possible that in this process, you’ll identify other areas of improvement and introduce positive changes to your business that will make it stronger, more efficient, and better prepared for the future.
Ready to follow up on your digital transformation?
Many companies embarked on digital transformation journeys years ago but are not reaping all its potential benefits today. Managing a sprawling, disjointed product portfolio is a challenge, one that impacts all other business processes and the organization’s overall efficiency.
Digital consolidation offers a clear path forward – optimizing your existing product portfolio to (re)align it with your business goals and create a more sustainable digital ecosystem for the future.
If you need an expert guide to take you through this process, we’re here to talk.
