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Thriving in an Increasingly Digital Ecosystem

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Thriving in an Increasingly Digital Ecosystem

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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Thriving in an Increasingly Digital Ecosystem about:reader?url=https%3A%2F%2Fround-lake.dustinice.workers.dev%3A443%2Fhttps%2Fsloanreview.mit.edu%2Farticle%2Ft...

sloanreview.mit.edu

Thriving in an Increasingly Digital


Ecosystem
Peter Weill and Stephanie L. Woerner

26-33 minutes

Topics

BBVA, a bank based in Spain, is becoming a more effective


omnichannel business by investing heavily in new-style consultative
branches, ATMs and a new digital bank to improve the customer
experience — while also attempting to keep costs low through
automation.

Image courtesy of BBVA.

The business world is rapidly digitizing, breaking down industry


barriers and creating new opportunities while destroying long-

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successful business models. We call this process digital disruption,


and although sweeping technology-enabled change often takes
longer than we expect, history shows that the impact of such
change can be greater than we ever imagined. Think steam
engines, cars, airplanes, TVs, telephones and, most recently,
mobile phones and e-books. With e-books, the market has been
slow to develop. Traditionalists said you wouldn’t be able to replace
the experience of a paper book. But e-books are gaining traction —
they are cheaper than paper books, faster to acquire and
searchable. Although the margins on them are thinner than the
margins on traditional books, the market is growing. In 2014, 28%
of American adults read an e-book, up from 17% in 2011.1

Given the amount of turmoil digital disruption is causing, it’s time for
companies to evaluate these threats and opportunities and start
creating new business options for the future — the more-connected
future of digital ecosystems. Board members at large companies
agree. In recent research by the MIT Center for Information
Systems Research, board members estimated that 32% of their
company’s revenue would be under threat from digital disruption in
the next five years; 60% of board members felt their boards should
spend significantly more time on this issue next year.2 Among the
disrupters board members worried about the most were Uber
(disrupting taxis); Airbnb (disrupting hotels); Apple Pay, Kabbage,
Venmo and others (disrupting banks); and Amazon (disrupting
booksellers and retailers of many other products).

On the other hand, increasing digitization also offers opportunities.


Companies can leverage strong customer relationships and
increase cross-selling opportunities. This article presents a
framework, supported by examples and financial performance
impacts, for helping managers to think about their competitive
environments in the digital era. (See “About the Research.”) We
had an important insight in the course of our research: that in this

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period of digital disruption, businesses focused narrowly on value


chains were at a disadvantage; they needed to think more broadly
about their business ecosystems. Indeed, we found that companies
that had 50% or more of their revenues from digital ecosystems
and understood their end customers better than their average
competitor had 32% higher revenue growth and 27% higher profit
margins than their industry averages.

To better understand digital disruption, we studied where


companies intended to move in the next five to seven years, on the
principle that “the future is already here — it’s just not evenly
distributed.”3 Based on this view, we decided to observe leading
companies that were embarking on one or more new digital
initiatives to see what works. In effect, the companies were buying
strategic options for the next-generation enterprise — in other
words, making investments now that can be exercised in the future.
We began by asking senior executives to describe their enterprises’
most important transformation initiatives. We heard about a wide
variety of initiatives, but generally companies were seeking to
transform in two dimensions: to know more about their end
customers, and to operate in an increasingly digital ecosystem.

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Today, most companies don’t think of themselves as operating in an


ecosystem but instead as controlling or participating in a more
linear value chain.4 In many ways, Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s primary
business model exemplifies this approach. Wal-Mart knows a lot

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about its products: where they come from, where they are in the
store and when they are sold. However, it doesn’t always know who
its customers are and why they are buying what they are buying.
But digitization enables consumers and companies to seek out a
wider array of benefits. The ecosystem for Amazon.com Inc., for
example, offers greater customer choice and enables faster
innovation. The enhanced consumer value comes from having
different vendors selling similar (or even identical) products — often
at different prices or service levels — and fast feedback that allows
vendors to improve their products and services. Consumers get a
one-stop Amazon-managed experience with greater choice and
with more information about prices and quality. Amazon gets to see
the data on all of the activity in its ecosystem, enabling fine-tuning
and identification of new opportunities while it extracts rents from
the ecosystem.

Do you engage your customers in episodic, disconnected


transactions, the way Wal-Mart and most other physical retailers
have done, without always knowing who the consumers are, what
they have previously purchased or from whom? Or are your
interactions with customers (whether individual consumers or
businesses) more like Amazon’s: continuous, collaborative and
informed by extensive knowledge of their purchase and search
habits?

Deep knowledge of your end customers includes their names and


addresses, demographics, IP addresses, purchase histories with
your company and with other companies, and most importantly,
their life events (such as upcoming weddings or births or, for
businesses, planned mergers or expansions). Consider the
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), headquartered in Sydney.
When CBA’s managers thought about how to grow their mortgage
business, they realized that the customer’s goal wasn’t to get a
mortgage — it was to buy a house. So CBA developed a

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smartphone app that helps customers achieve that goal. Users can
point their phone at houses they are interested in to review their
sale price history as well as similar information about homes
nearby. Users of the app thus become better informed about prices
in their target areas — and a hot source of mortgage leads for CBA.
Historically, those who get mortgages become long-term bank
customers — the best kind. Using the app, consumers made more
than 1.2 million property searches in the first six months after
deployment, and CBA estimated the app’s return on investment to
be 109%.5

Options for the Next-Generation Enterprise

The combination of moving from value chains to ecosystems and


increasing consumer knowledge provides business leaders with
four distinct business models, each with associated capabilities and
relationships. First, companies need to determine the extent to
which they want to control the value chain or be part of a more
complex ecosystem. Second, they need to decide how much they
want to invest in knowing their end customers. They can choose to
operate as (1) suppliers, (2) omnichannel businesses, (3)
ecosystem drivers or (4) modular producers. (See “Four Business
Models for the Digital Era.”)

In selecting the right business model, business leaders have four


distinct options (alone or in combination), with associated
capabilities and relationships. Executives need to determine (1) the
extent to which they want to control the value chain, or drive or be
part of an ecosystem that delivers on the end customer’s total
needs; and (2) the extent to which they know about their end
customer’s goals.

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The Supplier Model

Suppliers have, at best, a partial knowledge of their end consumer,


and typically operate in the value chain of another powerful
company. Companies that sell insurance via independent agents
(for example, Chubb Group), electronic goods through retailers
(such as Sony) or mutual funds through brokers (for example,
Vanguard) are suppliers. As enterprises continue to digitize and
search becomes easier, suppliers are likely to lose power and be
pressured to continually reduce prices, perhaps resulting in further
industry consolidation. For example, the Procter & Gamble
Company, a prime supplier in many other companies’ value chains,
has anticipated this potential loss of power and flat growth. To gain
more leverage, P&G has recently begun a campaign to learn more
about, and connect directly with, its more than 4 billion customers
worldwide using a variety of branding, social media, direct-to-
consumer connections and data-based approaches, in an effort to
move from the supplier model to the omnichannel model. P&G
operates more than 40 “business spheres,” which are real-time
decision support environments worldwide, which company
executives use to address particular business challenges (such as

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how to increase Tide laundry detergent sales in London). The data


is collected in planetarium-like display rooms where analysis and
debate take place and decisions are made. P&G uses sophisticated
cockpits where the impact of decisions can be tracked in real time
over the next few weeks and months, allowing managers to change
course as needed.

The Omnichannel Model

Omnichannel businesses provide customers access to their


products across multiple channels, including physical and digital
channels, giving them greater choice and a seamless experience.
Retailers including Carrefour, Nordstrom and Wal-Mart and banks
including Toronto-based CIBC and Bilbao, Spain-based BBVA
aspire to be omnichannel businesses controlling an integrated
value chain, with a strong claim to “owning” the customer
relationship. The challenge is to gain more and more knowledge of
the end consumer and his or her goals and to reduce the amount of
customer churn. Many companies we talked to mentioned big data
analytics, social media, mobile apps and customer experience
metrics such as the Net Promoter Score as avenues for increasing
their understanding of the end consumer. Some companies have
significantly invested in ways to better understand their end
customers’ life event needs and restructured their organizations
and uses of data to reflect these changes.

United Services Automobile Association (USAA), for example, was


started in the 1920s to serve the auto insurance needs of U.S.
military families. However, over the years, USAA, based in San
Antonio, Texas, has expanded its financial service offerings to
address the evolving needs of customers as they experience life
events such as buying a car, moving, getting married or having a
child. Each of these events triggers an integrated package of
products designed to meet customer needs. For example,

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customers buying cars are offered car loans, extended vehicle


protection, car insurance, month-by-month maintenance guides and
assistance selling their current car.6 Rethinking the business in
terms of life events prompted USAA to make organizational
changes; for example, it created a member experience group that
sits between the product owners and the customer. USAA’s
approach has earned high marks from its customers.7 Of course,
many banks and financial services companies use life events to
organize their marketing, but they often only put a digital facade
over their complex product silos without reorganizing the way
USAA did.

The Ecosystem Driver Model

Some companies, such as Amazon, Fidelity, Aetna, Apple and


Microsoft, establish an ecosystem by creating relationships with
other providers that offer complementary (or sometimes competing)
services. Ecosystem drivers provide a platform for the participants
to conduct business; the platform can be more or less open. For
example, Google has a very open platform, while Apple’s is more
closed. Fidelity’s platform offers its own mutual funds but also
includes funds from competitors such as Vanguard and products
and services from complementors such as personal investment
advisors. Like omnichannel businesses, ecosystem drivers use
their brand strength to attract participants, ensure a great customer
experience and offer one-stop shopping. They aspire to “own” the
customer relationship in one domain like financial services by
increasing their knowledge of their end consumers. They extract
rents from participants in their ecosystem — both consumers and
service providers — and rely on brand strength and feedback from
consumer ratings and reviews to build their reputation and
revenues. An ecosystem needs to be a destination for customers in
a specific domain (for example, health care, retail, entertainment,

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financial services or small business).

Aetna Inc., the $47 billion managed health care company that
serves both individuals and employers, is attempting to become a
health care destination. In addition to being part of 17 public health
exchanges, Aetna aims to be the company consumers turn to for
more and more of their health and lifestyle needs. This means
moving from being primarily business-to-business (managing
companies’ health plans) to business-to-business and business-to-
consumer (managing companies’ health care plans and interacting
with consumers directly) and business-to-consumer (selling directly
to consumers), while continuing to learn about the lifestyle needs of
end customers. Aetna is increasingly focusing on a multiproduct
and multiservice customer experience that integrates its own
products with those of third parties — for example, wellness and
health coaches, and smartphone apps such as iTriage, which lets
users check their symptoms, get information on medications and
find nearby hospitals.

The Modular Producer Model

Modular producers such as PayPal provide plug-and-play products


or services that can adapt to a variety of ecosystems. To survive,
modular producers must be among the best in their category. To
thrive, they need to continue rolling out new products and services
to demonstrate that they are among the best options available and
also well priced. After all, they operate in a hypercompetitive
environment in which it’s often very easy for customers to search
for alternative solutions and switch.

PayPal Inc., which had revenues of $7.6 billion in 2014, processed


transactions worth $235 billion and had a five-year annual growth
rate of 17.2% and operating margin of 23%. Because PayPal is
hardware-agnostic, mobile-enabled and cloud-based, it can operate

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in virtually any ecosystem. About 50% of PayPal’s revenue is from


outside the United States, demonstrating how a modular producer
must be able to fit into many ecosystems and regulatory
environments. One of the fascinating characteristics of modular
producers is that while there may be many players (in this case,
Apple Pay and Square), past experience indicates that only a few
players make significant profits while the others struggle to survive
in a commodity business. Also, in contrast to ecosystem drivers,
most modular producers don’t get to see all the customer data; they
are limited to the data from the transactions they process.

Where Companies Are Today

While most companies today are concentrating on developing


better products and building their relationships with customers, they
are using different models. Among the larger companies we studied
(those with more than $1 billion in revenue), we found that 24%
were omnichannel, 12% were ecosystem drivers, 46% were
suppliers and 18% were modular producers. Interestingly, the
smaller companies we studied (with revenues of less than $1
billion) have started increasing their knowledge of their customers
and becoming more networked, or they were already that way: 31%
of the smaller companies we studied were ecosystem drivers and
36% were omnichannel. Such companies are currently seizing
digital disruption opportunities while their larger counterparts are
struggling to respond. This shouldn’t be surprising. Smaller,
younger companies tend to have fewer legacy systems, be less
global and be more willing to take a risk with their business models
than larger enterprises. They are also more able to collect, analyze
and act on the data required to really know their end consumer —
data that larger companies also have an abundance of but
generally don’t exploit as well because of their numerous silos,
geographies and systems (and yes, politics) that make it difficult to
connect the dots. We found that companies that derive more

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revenues from managing ecosystems and that have better


customer knowledge tend to perform better. For example,
companies with ecosystem drivers as their dominant model had the
highest margins and growth of all four options in the companies we
studied. Part of the reason is that these companies are measurably
more responsive to their customers’ needs and become a
destination to sell their own products as well as others to address
their customers’ life events.

Today, as companies struggle to build ecosystems and learn more


about their customers, only a small percentage of the large
companies we studied (12%) are ecosystem drivers. Omnichannel
companies deliver the equivalent customer experience as
ecosystem drivers but are slightly slower to market with new
products. As a group, the omnichannel companies we studied were
less successful than the modular producers on both revenue
growth and margins. Companies operating strictly as suppliers
show weaker performance in all four categories.

Understanding the Digital Threat

For senior managers, a critical question is how urgently and


aggressively you need to establish options for future success. How
serious is the digital threat for your company, and how quickly do
you need to establish an ecosystem and develop a deeper
understanding of your customers? To help answer these questions,
we have developed a simple self-assessment tool. (See “Assess
the Digital Threat.”)

On the upside, increasing digitization offers opportunities such as


the opportunity to leverage a strong customer relationship and
increase cross-selling. On the downside, the threats are often real
and immediate. Two-thirds of respondents said they were
experiencing a high level of threat (threat levels that are 70% and
above) from enterprises in other industries that have existing

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relationships with their customers; with competing products or


services, these companies can potentially disrupt their businesses.
In addition, one-third of the respondents said that a competitor’s
alternative digital offering presented a high level of threat to their
core business.8 In cases where the threat is significant, managers
should actively be buying strategic options for future business
models and developing their ecosystems and increasing customer
knowledge. But what does it take to make this move?

We see many companies begin by using digital capabilities to


improve their end-customer knowledge: collecting, consolidating
and using insights about their customers. They move from
providing services directly to the consumer to assembling a web of
relationships that provide services. For example, with its Auto Circle
program, USAA helps customers find the right car, negotiate the
lowest price and even arrange delivery. The average savings for a
USAA member in 2014 was $3,485 off the recommended retail
price of a new car.9 USAA is extending the use of third parties to
broaden the services it provides customers for other life events
such as child care and home remodeling.

Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria S.A. is becoming a more effective


omnichannel business by investing heavily in new-style consultative
branches, ATMs and a new digital bank to improve the customer
experience — even as it attempts to keep costs low through
automation. At the same time, BBVA is experimenting with opening
up its core banking system to customers and third parties, such as
software vendors, telecommunications companies and retailers,
with applications that embed these services. For example, a
telecommunications company could develop a peer-to-peer
payment offering that uses BBVA’s core services for executing
payments.

Preparing for the Future

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To prepare for the future, companies need to develop new


capabilities in two areas. The first area is learning more about their
customers:

Use digital capabilities to obtain information about customers’


goals and life events. Many companies have customer data
stored in separate departments, systems and geographies, but not
often enough can they bring it together to act at the “moment of
truth” (the moment the customer remembers and talks about) on
the customer’s mobile device, during a phone call or at a physical
outlet.

Amplify the customer voice inside the company. Every


company we saw that put a premium on better customer knowledge
found a way to amplify the customer’s voice inside the company.
Amplifying the customer’s voice typically involves compelling the
widespread use of some kind of customer satisfaction metric,
accessing customers’ unvarnished sentiments via social media and
using big-data techniques to test and learn.

Emphasize evidence-based decision making. Effectively using


more and better knowledge about the customer also requires a
change in the decision-making culture. Many companies have
relied on gut instinct and management experience for making their
key decisions about customer needs. However, in the era of big
data, real-time dashboards and many other sources of hard
evidence, companies need to create much more of an evidence-
based culture. Experience and gut feel still matter for the
intangibles, but decisions must be driven by the evidence, not by
title or position.

For senior managers, a critical question is how urgently and


aggressively you need to establish options for future success. How
serious is the digital threat for your company?

Develop an integrated, multiproduct channel customer

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experience. Making actual customer needs and goals central to


the business model means that companies stop selling products
and instead meet the customer’s needs in the context of life events.
This change requires companies to become multiproduct and
multichannel simultaneously. That is no easy feat and often
requires significant organizational surgery, as we saw with USAA.

The second area is to become more of an ecosystem. For


companies that have learned how to manage value chains,
redesigning the business requires a difficult transformation. Here’s
what is required:

Become the first choice in your space. Being successful requires


being the first choice in your space for a significant number of
customers. Amazon is the first choice for many customers for retail.
Aetna would like to be the first choice for your health care needs.
Fidelity would like to be the first choice for your wealth
management. We believe that as business designs become more
open, with more competition, industries will consolidate. There will
be fewer profitable players that are ecosystem drivers and modular
producers. Being first choice requires a combination of having a
great brand, delivering on the brand’s promise, receiving great
customer recommendations and delivering world-class execution in
meeting customer needs.

Become great at building partnerships. Ecosystem drivers have


to find ways to partner with providers of complementary products
and services (and probably competitors, too) and then integrate
other things customers want, such as payments and delivery. At
Fidelity’s website, for example, customers can use the company’s
portfolio analysis tools to identify gaps in their portfolios and then
purchase a wide array of mutual funds from competitors (including
Vanguard, PIMCO and hundreds of other fund companies).

Create service-enabled interfaces that others can use. Success

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requires taking what makes you great — your core business


transactions — and making them easily and securely available
throughout your business — and also to your partners. Achieving
this is dependent on two things. First, you need to standardize and
make your business rules available (for instance, Aetna would
describe how it assesses a claim). Second, you need to make the
business transactions available as services. For example, both
Aetna and BBVA provide the application programming interfaces to
their core transactions to both insiders and outsiders to help drive
innovation. For Aetna, each API bundle includes additional health
content, data and services that can be included in any new product
or service offering and speed time to market. For BBVA, learning
how to make these business services available to other parts of its
global bank further informs how to offer the services outside the
company.

Treat efficiency and compliance as a competence. Success also


requires increased digitization of your company’s operations,
recognizing the inherent potential efficiencies, responsibilities and
threats. These include dealing with data privacy issues,
cyberthreats, potential service disruption and the need for
increasing levels of compliance with governments and other
regulators worldwide. Companies that can do all this will make
compliance a competence, not a chore, and will strive to be the
best in class.

What’s Next?

As we consider the future, we see digitization bringing threats and


opportunities. However, for existing businesses, the threats seem to
loom larger. Take banking, for example. The United States has
thousands of banks. As digitization compels banks to transform, we
expect to see industry consolidation. Banks that succeed in being
local and relevant in their communities will thrive as omnichannel

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businesses. But many banks will need to become ecosystem


drivers, at least for a subset of their customers. If they succeed,
they will become the first choice for meeting all of the financial
needs for a segment of customers, providing not only their own
products but also complementary products and services from
others. However, if they don’t succeed in becoming the first choice
for a large enough group of their customers, the future becomes
less rosy. Some banks will be relegated to providing highly
regulated, back-end transaction processing (in other words, they
will be modular producers), selling commodity services and losing
touch with their customers. Their customers will increasingly look to
companies such as Apple or Google as the destination to meet
their financial services needs. It will be a slow death of a thousand
cuts — year by year — as margins decrease.

To avoid this outcome, we suggest that you take the initiative now.
Work with a group of colleagues and customers across your
respective businesses to assess your business, and then share the
results with each other. If you have multiple businesses, repeat this
exercise for each of your major products and services. When the
threat is serious, we recommend reviewing efforts to buy strategic
business options for the future. Are your current efforts sufficient?

As you ponder how a digital future will change your business, it’s
worth remembering the words of computer visionary Alan Kay: “The
best way to predict the future is to invent it.”10

Topics

About the Authors

Peter Weill is chairman and senior research scientist at the MIT


Sloan School of Management’s Center for Information Systems
Research, where Stephanie L. Woerner is a research scientist.

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References (10)

1. K. Zickuhr and L. Rainie, “E-Reading Rises as Device Ownership


Jumps,”January 16, 2014, www.pewinternet.org.

2. P. Weill and S.L. Woerner, “Working With Your Board on Digital


Disruption?,” research briefing, MIT Center for Information Systems
Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 16, 2015.

Show All References

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