Digital transformation survival guide: Unlocking business value with an open platform. Part 2: Appraise yourself honestly

Who should read this guide?

• Chief Digital & Innovation Officers 

• Heads of Product & eCommerce 

• Partner & Alliances Leaders 

• Customer Experience Leaders 

• API Product Managers 

• Marketing Leaders

Banking • Healthcare
Insurance • Manufacturing
Transportation & Logistics
Retail • Pharma

In 2020, businesses that hadn’t yet undergone a digital transformation were caught off guard. COVID-19 changed the world and exposed weaknesses. But it also revealed resilience and helped organizations focus on building the connections that really matter. 

In 2021, those that understand the importance of reorienting the business with an open platform will be well positioned for future digital success. 

Welcome to the Digital Transformation Survival Guide 

If you’re like a lot of business decision-makers, 2020 was a crash course in digital transformation. Given only about eight weeks to do what typically takes five years, no one got everything right. The key now is to take a deep breath and make sure you’re building the right strategy and prioritizing the right products, projects, and programs for 2021 and beyond.

If you’re looking for answers about how to eliminate data silos and move your digital projects forward, you’ve come to the right place. This Guide explains how an open platform provides the strategy and capabilities you will need to face new (and urgent) business challenges, to grow, and to evolve your organization and your operations so you’re stronger than ever before. 

It’s divided into four parts, each designed to guide you further along the path to long-term digital success.

Part 1: Embrace the challenges

Reconfiguring your business for the future isn’t a small thing. Learn about the challenges you’ll face and how an open platform can help you address them.

Part 2: Appraise yourself honestly

Knowing where you’re starting from is the only way you can move forward. Assess your organization’s level of digital maturity and get guidance on what to do next.

Part 3: Explore the possibilities of an open digital model

Learn how an open platform can help you reach new customers, experiment with new business models, and create new products and services faster at lower cost.

Part 4: The future is open – create your digital destiny

Prepare to take the next steps with an open platform to unlock existing digital assets and create new business value. 

Appraise yourself honestly 

In Part 1 of this Guide, we explained why it’s important for business leaders to embrace the challenges of digital transformation. The next step is to understand your current level of digital maturity so you can make a realistic plan. 

Axway’s Digital Maturity Assessment draws on research with over 2,100 enterprises to help you map your current capabilities and challenges to your goals, so you can keep moving forward no matter where you are today. The assessment provides: 

• Your overall score, which measures your current digital maturity compared to your peer organizations 

• Your spider chart showing relative strengths and weaknesses across five key areas

• Personalized guidance on how to avoid pitfalls and accelerate digital projects 

What’s your organization’s digital maturity? 

Developed by the Catalysts team of API and digital transformation experts, the assessment’s 15 questions get right to the heart of where your organization stands today, and what you need to do next. 

Spend five minutes to find out — and save yourself months down the road 

Take the Assessment

Experimenting and coasting 

Risk being complacent: overly cautious or overly confident 

Businesses that are experimenting feel like they have plenty of time to adapt. Maybe they have deployed their first API management solution but with limited success. Projects tend to be tested by lines of business, with each adopting the tech stack their teams want to use for a single use case. 

Businesses that are coasting may have adopted “just enough” digital solutions to meet their traditional customer needs. Their revenue streams are consistent, but not growing, and they may have felt some shocks from COVID-19 as digital demands and needs have changed. 

If you are at either of these two levels, an open platform can help you build the momentum you are lacking: 

• Adapt to the new market environment while avoiding the pains of reorienting to a high level of digital maturity too suddenly 

• Increase revenue through accelerated innovation

• Encourage higher API adoption and gain the agility to evolve in future  

Take the assessment.

Your score shows how far you’ve progressed on your digital journey, and indicates whether you are currently struggling, reacting, experimenting, coasting, or disrupting with your API program and digital strategy as it stands today.

Disrupting 

Building new business models at the peak of digital maturity 

At the highest level of digital maturity, businesses are constantly disrupting. They can take first-mover advantage and introduce not just new digital products and services but create new digital business models that work with partnerships and enable end customers to create the value they want. 

Disruptors tend to manage large API deployments but may still have challenges with a lack of visibility across their operations. This may mean they are paying for unused assets or for overlapping offerings. They tend to manage multi-cloud and hybrid environments. 

At this level, you can use an open platform approach to innovate and lead your industry.

• Increase revenue through accelerated innovation and API business models

• Build business ecosystems and platforms for co-creation

• Build a vibrant developer community that is eager to use your APIs to extend their own offerings

Your full report presents the bigger picture and insights on what you need to do to move forward as fast as possible. It includes your individual “spider chart” to help you spot strengths and weaknesses in the five key maturity areas, recommendations for next steps, and guidance for avoiding pitfalls that could cost you precious time (and a lot of money) down the road.

Open platform-as-a-service business model 

Case Study: HM Health Solutions 

No matter your stage of digital maturity, you can use an open platform to redefine infrastructure management as a strategic business decision. In turn, this leads to new business model opportunities by drawing on your tech stack to open APIs. 

When healthcare industry leader Highmark embarked on an open platform approach, they realized that many other health insurance providers would face similar challenges. Seeking to share their experience while maintaining their market position, Highmark created a new subsidiary, HM Health Solutions, leveraging their shared service catalog that had proven so successful for internal developer teams. This allowed them to offer a capabilities-and-expertise-as-a-service model to other insurance providers. 

Health insurer helps health plan payers create compelling, API-powered digital experiences for members. 

• 5,000 developers deliver a shared, self-service catalog of API information across the organization 

• 13 health plan payers use HM Health Solutions platform-as-a-service solution to serve their members 

• Empowering clients to create responsive and personalized member experiences online and on mobile so they can compete effectively

Read the Case Study

Not sure where to start? 

Ask the Catalysts 

The Catalysts are a group of experts from around the world who are seriously passionate about digital transformation, APIs, and open platforms. 

In the simplest of terms, their mission is to help people make good decisions about why, when, and how to change the business in order to navigate the next disruption — and have the courage to do it again and again. 

Sometimes those decisions involve technology, but just as often they center around teams, governance, funding, ecosystems, monetization, or a dozen other things that determine who thrives and who merely survives in the digital economy. 

Schedule 30 Minutes with a Catalyst

Take the Assessment, then keep going. 

Read Explore the possibilities of an open digital model, Part 3 of the Digital transformation survival guide: Unlocking business value with an open platform 

Download Part 3