Modeling Digital Business Strategy

Businesses need to be agile, customer-oriented, efficient and data-driven to be relevant in the digital economy. Digital economy is different in many ways than the classical economy. In the digital economy, companies must observe and consider far more dynamics to understand the nature of the disruption that can disrupt their business. Disruption can come anytime and from anywhere in the digital economy. How to characterize and anticipate the digital disruption and changing market conditions is a big challenge for corporations. Corporations need to understand the relevant dynamics and characterize them in a holistic view. Given so many complex dynamics involved, we believe an intelligence framework should be used to model the digital business strategy. The intelligence framework should be (1) layered to provide decision making help for business level objectives, strategy and policy level objectives, and for functional objectives, (2) should support qualitative analysis to model uncertainty situations where qualitative analysis with hypothesis is helpful, (3) should support sensitivity analysis, (4) should support incorporating various strategy evaluation and characterization methodologies. In this paper, we attempt high level characterizations of the dynamics involved in the digital business strategy and discuss how a layered intelligence framework could be used to model it.