Improve Your Business IQ with Digital, Process, & Content

Your organization might have the motivation, resources, and competencies to develop innovative ideas, but that doesn’t necessarily equate to successful innovation.

A robust digital IQ is the missing link between having everything you need for an innovative business strategy and actually putting it to work. Companies with a high digital IQ are able to efficiently leverage their assets and resources towards digital pursuits.

This concept is key in maintaining a competitive edge in today’s commercial and economic landscape. Every organization, in every industry, can benefit from boosting their digital IQ and using those gains to build better systems, meet customer expectations, and empower employees.

Process IQ and Content IQ operate in similar ways but focus on different ends of the business spectrum. Read on to find out how improving these key metrics may lead to transformative gains for your organization.

The Pace of Digital Innovation Is Quickening

Simply investing in digital assets and strategies is not enough to guarantee a high digital IQ. Technological innovators are releasing sophisticated tools and solutions at increasingly rapid speeds, giving organizations less time to accommodate new technologies.

The overall effect can be disconcerting. Putting your organization to work implementing one suite of next-generation technologies may prevent you from aligning efforts towards deploying a different set of tools. This can lead to departmental friction – where your sales team gets a shiny new toy, and your marketers or customer support team don’t.

It takes an extraordinary commitment from your IT team to cover all technological fronts that are driving technological value. Raising your entire company’s digital IQ helps prevent your organization from getting left behind.

Increase Your Digital IQ

There are a few key steps that companies can take to improve their digital IQ:

• Link Digital and Business Strategies Together. If your organization’s digital strategy does not complement your business strategy, it will be difficult to make digital investments that deliver long-term value. Simply buying every cutting-edge piece of technology on the market is not going to cut it.

• Diagnose and Prioritize Digital Initiatives. Since you cannot reasonably expect to afford every single piece of technology under the sun, you have to assess and prioritize the initiatives most likely to drive value. Obtaining stakeholder consensus on this score is critical to raising your company’s digital IQ.

• Build Relationships with Reputable Digital Vendors. Connect with third-party vendors that offer services in fields where digital innovation is occurring. This will ensure you have access to the best technologies of the moment without having to constantly spend time, energy, and resources maintaining and updating them.

Digital IQ is part and parcel to building a bridge between the way your organization works now, and the way it needs to work in the future. Leaders who adopt this mindset for digital initiatives are well-equipped to expand the approach for other areas as well.

Where Do Process IQ and Content IQ Fit In?

So far, the case for improving your organization’s digital IQ is strong. But there are two other concepts that play a major role in improving organizational preparedness for future innovation.

• Process IQ refers to the innovation-oriented activities that improve the organization’s capacity to develop and implement new processes. It reflects your ability to reshape the way it runs in accordance with new opportunities, technologies, or talents.

• Content IQ helps digitally-enabled teams generate content that is meaningful in a highly automated enterprise context. Technologies such as optical character recognition (OCR) and machine learning (ML) help to take unstructured information and transform it into actionable, ready-to-use data.

The activities that can raise your organization’s digital IQ can also raise its process IQ and content IQ. All you have to do is orient attention and resources towards the appropriate components of your strategy.

Taking the time to step back and connect your process development strategy to your overall business strategy can help solve long-standing issues. For instance, a web development agency may audit its processes to identify why it consistently underestimates project hours. Asking these kinds of questions and finding answers raises your process IQ.

Diagnosing and prioritizing content initiatives can result in far more robust delivery and communication. Streamlining content workflows by consolidating data into automatic, digitally empowered processes can eliminate inefficiencies across every level of the organization.

Building relationships with third-party vendors can position the organization to make the most of its digital environment. From calling in developers to build powerful application programming interfaces (APIs) to outsourcing customer-facing content generation to professional services, every step helps organizations focus on their core value drivers.