The Digital Transformation Playbook: Rethink Your Business for the Digital Age

Step 5: Defining Impact
At this point, you should bring each of your ideas back to the business 
objectives you set for yourself in step 1. For each strategic concept, you need 
to answer these questions: If you do proceed with this, how will you know 
if you have achieved the objectives you set? For example, if your objective 
is to reduce customer attrition, will the strategy you have developed address 
this? If so, how will you measure its impact? If your objective is to drive 
product awareness and discoverability and you have developed a series of 
content initiatives as part of an engage strategy, how will you know if they 
are achieving your goal? The point here is to articulate a measurable benefit 
to your company and clarify how you think the strategic concepts you have 
developed will achieve this outcome.
Having completed all five steps, you should now have a set of compel-
ling new customer strategies for your team to consider for implementation. 
These should be strategies rooted in a deep understanding of your specific 
customers, based on their own networked behaviors, designed to add real 
value for these customers, and able to drive the objectives most important 
to your business.

---

46
H A R N E S S C U S T O M E R N E T W O R K S
This tool has been designed for strategic ideation. Still to come would be any 
planning to test your strategic concepts, validate them, allocate resources 
to them, refine their metrics, and (if appropriate) move to a public launch. 
We will talk more about how to test and learn from new strategic ideas in 
chapter 5.
Before we leave the domain of customer strategy, though, let’s consider 
some of the challenges that a traditional, pre-digital-era enterprise may face 
in rethinking its assumptions about customers.
Organizational Challenges of Customer Networks
Joseph Tripodi knows something about customer networks. Over the 
course of his career, he has served as the chief marketing officer at All-
state Insurance, The Bank of New York, MasterCard, Seagram, and Coca-
Cola. When I spoke to him about his view of the changing relationship of 
organizations to customers, he told me, “For any large organization, this is 
definitely a journey. We’re waking up to the fact that we’ve been too passive 
by trying to engage with consumers in more traditional ways. How do you 
build an infrastructure for ongoing, real-time consumer engagement? It’s a 
challenge for behemoth companies who operate around the world.”
17
For some time, Tripodi has been thinking about customer networks in 
terms of three different networks. One network is end consumers. Another 
is business customers, whether retailers, analysts, or opinion elites who 
influence your industry and regulations. The third is your own employees.
Enabling the Network Inside
A firm’s internal customer network—its own employees—is critical to 
the digital transformation of a business. That transformation begins with 
applying the same customer network strategies we have seen to help inter-
nal teams achieve their goals. As workforces become more mobile, busi-
nesses need to help employees access their work more easily and flexibly. 
Employees need to be able to engage with the right content, information, 
and resources to stay informed for their job. They need tools that allow 
them to customize their workflow around flexible travel, roles, and sched-
ules. They need to connect with each other—to share knowledge and to ask 
and answer questions—using various modes of communication (e-mails, 

---

H A R N E S S C U S T O M E R N E T W O R K S

47
instant messages, videoconferences) without confusion. And they need to 
be able to collaborate using tools that allow them to share projects and files 
while working remotely and asynchronously.
As big a challenge as all this may be, the bigger challenges are often 
cultural. As Tripodi told me, “We have to evolve to be a much more per-
meable hierarchy, where information is collected, gathered, analyzed, and 
shared at all levels.”
Reducing hierarchical control is rarely easy. Many times, distrust of 
employees and fear of risk can lead organizations to wall off digital con-
nections and restrict employees from using online tools effectively. The 
head of human resources for a billion-dollar business unit of a large multi-
national firm confessed to me that even she was not able to access YouTube 
while at work. The IT department forbade tablet computers and sealed 
off employees behind a tight firewall. If she wanted to find educational 
content for her own staff, she had to search from her home computer on 
the weekends. So much for using technology to educate and connect your 
workforce! Walling off employees because you fear their freedom to con-
nect digitally is a losing strategy.
Nurturing an effective employee network is all the more important as 
the size of a firm increases, as its geographical disparity increases (making 
casual face-to-face interactions more difficult), and as its employees’ and 
executives’ jobs change more rapidly.