Digital platforms, challenges and benefits of digital platforms

1. Digital Platforms: Fostering
Creativity and Sustainability and
Networking
Presented By:
Stanley Muli

2. Introduction
• In today’s environment, businesses achieve the speed necessary to
compete with their peers through the use of digital platforms.
• The engagement of digital platforms helps organizations to improve
competitive intelligence through creativity; brand visibility, marketing
effectiveness for sustainability; and viewership with personalized, relevant
advertising and promotions for networking.
• Information and Internet technology has changed value propositions and
business models

3. Figure 4-1
Information and Internet technology: Enablers of Digital Platforms
Figure: 1

4. What are Digital Platforms?

5. Digital Platforms:
• are electronic tools that are used for exchange of information, goods or
services. These tools enhance organizations to achieving the speed
necessary for competing in today’s business environment.
• According to Gawer & Cusumano (2014), digital platforms are new
product development that are built through incremental innovation around
reusable components or technologies referred to as internal platforms in
that firm, either working by itself or with suppliers, can build a family of
related products or sets of new features by deploying these components.
• The digital platforms can be classified according to the outcome of digital
business or according to specific purpose they serve.

6. Classifications of Digital Platforms
• social media platform like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are based on user
interaction and advertising sales.
• Service platforms like uber accelerate digital transformation by offering single-click
access to products or services.
• Media sharing platform like YouTube involves a business model of offering data-
driven advertising and web browser real estate and
• knowledge platform like Quora and Yahoo!.
• Each classification serve a specific purpose hence each digital platform enhances
user interactions by creating its own set of rules, including rules for how much
advertising revenue is allowed, rules for managing content and suppliers, and rules
regarding user relationships.
• Some of the key issues digital platforms address are vendor management
workflows, labor-intensive processes for publishing metadata, lack of distribution
platforms, extended product launch times, legacy platforms without self-service
capabilities, poor customer experiences due to complex front-end systems, and
increasing operational costs due to manual back-end operation.

7. • Security is the key issue in digital platforms
• Security promotes interaction between businesses and consumers.
• The security measures provide ability to scale up with the everyday
advancement of digital progression, and providing value for those
accessing the platform.
• Development of technology continues and new needs from users arise as
the more traditional companies are taking the plunge and investing in
information technology (Vinnova, 2018).
• The quest for usability of the new technologies and visual appeal are also
driving forces behind digital platforms.
• The power of digital platforms comes from the competitive advantage of
integrated analytics and personalized solutions.
• Big and small companies have realized that digital platforms are creating
new valuable opportunities and new business models have been particularly
interesting.

8. Challenges of Digital platforms
a) Internet connectivity
b) Advancement in technology
c) Digital interests
d) Management strategies
e) Finding the right technologies and the digital talent
f) Rigidness to change
g) Security issues
h) Power issues
i) Competition
j) Environmental pollution
k) New Rules and Regulations Constraints

9. Summary Solutions to the Challenges
• Web extranet for order entry, customization, inventory, change
orders, and shipping
• Demonstrates how IT and the Web coordinate the flow of information
about orders, production, inventory and shipment
• Illustrates how systems in the digital firm connect demand, supply,
and fulfillment to achieve operational excellence

10. Benefits of Digital Platforms
 Enabling web operations to publish real-time content expedites time-to-
market with a consistent, unified digital experience.
 Streamlining and improving the user experience is easier with dynamic
web content that supports advertising and provides frictionless
interactions.
 Improve competitive intelligence, brand visibility, marketing
effectiveness, and viewership with personalized, relevant advertising and
promotions.
 Digital platforms empower rapid innovation. Significantly reduce the
time it takes to launch new products by automating and streamlining
workflow processes and implementing custom rules for testing and
usage.

11. Cont.
 Digital platforms can increase self-service functionality for customer inquiries and
automate some backend operations, relieving some of your employees' valuable time
and mental bandwidth.
 Customer experience and satisfaction improve exponentially on high-value digital
platforms, leading to increased viewership.
 Standardization of the cloud and the newest innovative technologies means the most
effective technology stack for workflow optimization and elastic infrastructure.
 Digital platforms provide reliable recording, monitoring, and forecasting functionality,
helping users to identify substandard operating conditions and adjust accordingly.
 Managing web experiences and mobile experiences from a single, unified interface
can increase authoring efficiency.
 Digital platforms create opportunities for new, inventive business models by
differentiating business functionalities and evaluating several business models in
various marketplaces.

12. How IT as a Tool fosters creativity, sustainability and networking
•Information technology infrastructure: The Internet provides a universal and easy-
to-use set of technologies and technology standards that can be adopted by all
organizations.
•Direct communication between trading partners: Disintermediation removes
intermediate layers and streamlines processes.
•Round the clock service: Web sites available to consumers 24 hours
•Extended distribution channels: Outlets created for attracting customers who
otherwise would not patronize a firm
•Reduced transaction costs: Costs of searching for buyers declines
•Changing Economies of Information:
•Information asymmetry: One party in a transaction has more information than the other. The
Internet decreases information asymmetry.
•Increases richness: The Internet increases the depth, detail, and scope of information.
•Increases reach: The Internet increases the number of people who can be contacted efficiently.

13. Cont.
• Interactive Marketing and Personalization
• Clickstream tracking tools: Collect data on customer activities at Web sites and
store them in a log
Web Site Visitor
Tracking

14. Web Personalization
•Create unique personalized Web pages for each customer
•Increased closeness to customer increases value to the customer, while
reducing costs of interacting with the customer
Figure 4-4
Figure 2

15. Collaborative filtering:
• Compares information gathered about a specific user’s behavior at a
Web site to data about other customers with similar interests to predict
what the user would like to see next. The software then makes
recommendations to users based on their assumed interests.
• Customer Self-Service
•The use of Web sites to provide customers with access to information
and answers to questions
•Replacing human call center operators and clerks
•UPS.com: Customer tracking of packages
•Orbitz.com: Customer self-help for organizing and managing a trip
•Dell.com: “My Order Status” facility

16. Conclusion
• Digital platform innovativeness is like competitors running with an egg on
a spoon
• Lifespan of organizations that do not innovate are like mushrooms: they
appear and disappear
• Digital platforms create opportunities for new, inventive business models
by differentiating business functionalities and evaluating several business
models in various marketplaces.

17. END
Thank You