Shifting from Digital New to Now | Digital Transformation Strategy

While Proof of Concepts (POC) and experimentation may continue, its time to put a stake in the ground for the what and how of Digital Transformation. How are IT Leaders moving out of the sandbox and shifting from Digital New to Now?

Contributor

- Marianne Marck, Chief Information Officer, Ritchie Bros.

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Top 5 Learning Points

Organization must be able to translate their digital efforts to the customers by providing a great digital experience.
Customers look for value while using the web or mobile applications and organizations must be able to deliver that by adapting.
Companies must be able to understand what customers expect from their digital channels and give them exactly the same.
Transformation is key to success.
Understanding the legacy and taking decisions thereby to suit them is an important strategic tool that must be applied.

Show Notes

Not all experiments lead to profit generation and that must considered during developing strategies.
Customer focused approach must ensure that it adds value to their use of the digital apps.
Legacy systems can be kept as they are and additional features can be bought which is important.
Some part of the technology might become obsolete and must be parted away without any hesitation.
Uncertainty is good and should not deter companies from trying new things.

Summary

Digital presence is a must in today’s online world. But how can businesses leverage using the virtual presence of customers and increase their profitability? How can organizations keep experimenting and how much failure is okay? Understanding the nuances of digitalization and how to implement it in the right context is what is discussed thoughtfully backed with knowledge and expertise.

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Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:23]:

Hello. Welcome to this segment on CTN. To learn more, please visit ciotalknetwork.com. Our topic for today is Shifting from Digital New to Now. Our guest for today is Marianne Marck, who’s the Chief Information Officer with Ritchie Bros. Hi, Marianne. How are you?

Marianne Marck [00:00:40]:

Hi, Sanjog Aul. I’m great. Thank you for having me.

Sanjog Aul [00:00:43]:

Oh, the pleasure is all ours. So I hope you’re enjoying the holiday season and looking forward to 2018. How’s the plan going for you?

Marianne Marck [00:00:53]:

Well, it is a very busy year for us. Looking forward to 2018, we’re going to be focused a great deal on integration with IronPlanet, a company that we acquired in June. We are well down the path to integration, but we are taking on some of the big heavy lifting in 2018. We have a significant effort where we’re going to be adopting their auction management system. I can answer more questions about that as we go through the interview if you’d like.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:25]:

Oh, that’s beautiful. So given that it’s any organization, including yours, digital transformation is part of your agenda, a huge part of your agenda. We see everyone out there talking about going through this transformation, but there is experimentation going on, proof of concepts being done. There has to be a point where we say, okay, that’s great. That’s some good learning. We know what we should work on versus not. Then it should start becoming mainstream. Am I being too anxious, or do you think it’s just about the time when the honeymoon should be over?

Marianne Marck [00:02:06]:

Well, I find in many companies, taking an experiment to being actually a part of everyday business can be a challenge, especially because some of those experiments may not necessarily result in revenue generation, or they may not be a value stream that you need to have as part of your business ongoing. So it really depends upon where everyone is in terms of their digital transformation journey. But for some companies, like at Ritchie Bros., we’ve been digital for a long time. We started out with a simulcast capability so that when we run auctions, they run live and they run online at the same time. We’ve been doing that since 2001. So half of all of our transactions happen online. We were missing out on some of the efficiency gains that going digital would bring us. So that’s just one example. One of the things is, in June, we acquired IronPlanet, and everyone there, a true hallmark of a digital company, they all work online. All of the information they need to do a great job for customers is there, the data and information that they need. For many companies, they’re in very different phases. Most companies have adopted, they’ve had to be where their customers are. But some haven’t quite made it in their mobile journey, or some really haven’t harnessed data to build great products yet. Where we are, we’re sort of in that middle phase and looking at where do we really invest for the biggest bang for our customers and our company.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:18]:

So given the stage that you’re in, and you are right that there could be two levels at which people could be going all the way. If they have a very strong revenue case, then of course they can keep going, and they may have already made significant progress. But we also have situations where it is shown as a transformation, where the transformation, till the time it’s completely done, will not create the final value that we all dream of. We still have to sell it because without the funding, it will never see the daylight. What has been seen by many organizations is they start a journey, try to get a piece funded, and when they move forward, the business stakeholders don’t see the value truly created, tangible value to the level that they expected; they start becoming disheartened, disenchanted, and they almost pull the plug, or in some cases they actually pull the plug. How can we prevent that from happening? Because this is happening way too often.

Marianne Marck [00:05:36]:

Well, I think this is one of the biggest challenges that every CIO or CTO faces, because in many cases the foundational technology is not in place. They have legacy systems. They have some newer applications, but they may struggle a great deal to be able to expose all the value those applications bring in the form of services that can be exposed to customers through mobile applications or web applications. The challenge is how do you bring to life, let’s say, an inventory management system or another application that actually would have a lot of value if your customers could directly access it. Those foundational projects are probably the most challenging. The foundational work has to be done on an ongoing basis. It actually requires an ongoing investment. So the first thing that the CIO has to do is create a good plan for that foundational transformation, but also has to deliver customer-facing value along the way. Some projects can end up thinking it’s gonna take us 2 or 3 years to actually get there. But you must deliver something of value, something tangible for customers in less than 1 year. Most companies now have agile processes, and they’re able to deliver ongoing enhancements every 2 weeks or every week. But that’s because the company has invested in that value stream. They have dedicated technology people and dedicated product people, and it’s a living, breathing thing now. For example, your online web presence or your mobile application requires ongoing investment. For those back-of-house transformations that really open up the world for your customers, those really take some very deep planning and deep commitment. But I would also say that you can’t take that commitment alone. The CIO should always have a partner in the business. Your business transformation, in order for it to actually happen and work really well with your customers, your product, operations, and marketing people have to be part of that effort from the very beginning. You have to be able to get to pilot, do some demonstration, and then break down that big project into chunks so that you are delivering a visible value in less than 1 year. Otherwise, those projects—I don’t see them be—I’ve seen multi-year projects fail pretty consistently because people lose their patience, and your business leaders dealing with the risk of the money you’re spending on those projects start to lose patience over time.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:53]:

And this problem of long planned projects or things which are very monolithic, those are things of the past. I hope more and more leaders are becoming intelligent about how much they chop out the projects so that they’re manageable bite-sized chunks which you can get done. Now, coming to the digital side, it seems—this is just my sensing—that there is a sense of fear or uncertainty about whether we are ready yet to embrace digital to the fullest. Because of that, there is a lot more experimentation going on than I would have imagined in a given organization before they’ll say, okay, let’s roll it out. Way too many POCs. And then there is way too much analysis paralysis because they feel it’s too new. We are not equipped for it. Our people have no background in it, and so we have to test it a little more. Why is that? Do you think we really are not ready after all this effort?

Marianne Marck [00:10:11]:

Well, I would say in our company we’re not in that place, primarily because we made some very big bets. You could say we advanced our digital transformation by acquiring a company that was a pure online player for the last 18 years. We have our plate full with a great roadmap for transformation. We can’t lose sight of our customers along the way, and that is something that everyone must think about. With a proof of concept, we might get stuck in analysis paralysis because we have uncertainty about the value and uncertainty about how to pull it off. This is why companies absolutely have to fund their digital channels on an ongoing basis and make that investment in technology skills, product skills, and customer experience skill sets. Without that investment and that ongoing care and feeding of what should be a true value stream for the company, they’re not going to make it. In some cases, if they feel like they’re lost in analysis paralysis, they haven’t set themselves up to really be live and to test live with their customers, to be able to do a small release here and there and to see: is that resonating? Is it leading to more conversions? Is it delighting our customers and making our site sticky for them and making them want to come back? Is the experience frictionless? Is it easy for them? Are they getting hung up and stuck along the way? Companies have to actually make that shift. It has to be not just a one-time thing or a marketing blast. It has to be a going concern that is funded on a regular basis and whose value is measured on a regular basis.

Sanjog Aul [00:12:36]:

So what you just said about people doing this experimentation—that’s exactly what I’m referring to: they are doing only experimentation. They are like, okay, go ahead, try it live with customers. They did try it, but then they want to do yet another trial and yet another trial and not actually take it mainstream. At what point would somebody feel that they have really done all the possible trials before they put it in production and roll it out full throttle? What’s holding them back?

Marianne Marck [00:13:11]:

I would also say, if companies are churning, then they have a bigger problem. They’re having a lot of difficulty determining what is going to resonate with customers and what customers are picking up. You have to look at what money we are spending on this experimentation, and what is the minimum that we need in order to be able to turn it into revenue for our company. If companies find themselves stuck, they have to pause. They may need to put some of those programs on hold while they assess what customers need the most, what is going to give value to the company, what is really going to increase revenue. For example, they may not have a good way to measure it. Maybe they’re doing some marketing ‘me too’ innovative experimentation. But if there isn’t a way to measure what kind of revenue or value that brought into the company, then it’s probably just a flash in the pan. If it’s not really producing recurring revenue, it’s not worth doing. Companies must measure the effects of their efforts. We’re in a business at Ritchie Bros. where we sell very high-value equipment. We can do very targeted 1-on-1 marketing, and we can show that return on investment from a digital marketing side. I’ve also worked in other industries where we sold very high-value equipment, and it’s very important to have an attribution model so that you can see when I invested in this marketing channel, I can show through the clickstream data up until the sale what my customer used as the way to get into the site: which marketing vehicle. Then you can measure those marketing vehicles: how much did we spend on them and how much revenue did they bring in? Those kinds of attribution models are a great way to actually run your online business. If you don’t have a way to measure it, it’s very hard to know if your bets are really placed in the right places and are going to pay off. So does that answer that question of frustration, do you think?

Sanjog Aul [00:15:58]:

No. It does. I mean, it does, and it’s a viewpoint where the approach that they have been taking is different. For example, in your case you are taking a very measurable approach versus throwing spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks. That’s what you’re saying: your experimentation also should be very measurable. Exactly. So let’s take a quick break. We’ll be right back. And then let’s look at, besides taking something very measurable, the difference between the companies who have actually been able to scale their operations and the approach they take to running their business into digital now versus other people who are just experimenting. What did they do differently or new in terms of adopting digital so that they are no longer digital wannabes? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:19:04]:

Well, welcome back. So, Mary Anne, here, we’ve noted a small percentage of companies who have gone much further in terms of making progress and shifting from digital new to now. If you were to do a postmortem, of course you don’t have details for every company that has done it, but what do you see are the common fundamentals which would have helped them to drive that shift much better than the others?

Marianne Marck [00:19:37]:

I think the first thing that makes a big difference is that all of the leadership in the company believe that they must. It’s an imperative to transform, because they will not be where their customers are if they don’t. We have to reach all of our customers wherever they are today. They’re on their mobile devices, everyone is working online, and we have to reach customers where they are in a meaningful way and in a way that maybe transforms the way they interact with the world. We’ve seen the big digital disruptors like Uber and Netflix that actually change the way people are consuming. We’re right in the middle of a pretty significant upheaval around that. This year, there were a record number of store closings, because everyone has really made that big shift to online. Companies actually have to think about these big seismic shifts and how well they are going to be able to compete in a world that is transforming very rapidly. A big challenge for companies is to actually know where to start. Most companies already have an online presence, but they maybe haven’t really harnessed differentiating capabilities for their customers. It’s identifying the things that are going to matter the most and bring the most value that really helps a company be successful. So it isn’t just about being the flashiest, but it’s also about having the most staying power and providing goods and services in a way that really resonates and meets the customer’s needs. At Ritchie Bros., we’re in a B2B space. We have to think about our customers; they’re running their business and making big investments. What are all of the capabilities we can provide online? One thing we do is financing. Those actually make it a lot easier for our customers to transact with us, and we want to be very sticky with them too. We have a lot of things in the works that are very digitally based products that make a big difference to those customers with asset disposition and pricing predictions and a lot of different services that are going to help them do a better job. That is really a big thing: what does transformation mean to us? I think all companies have to ask themselves that.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:24]:

So if you go digital, I know you could have coexistence of some legacy, and then you are really leaving something on the table. At the same time, if you try to go holistic, then you will be waiting and nobody wants to do that. What can we do so that organizations embrace the idea that progress is better than perfection, but at the same time they are also able to drop the legacy at some point to say, guys, we have to go full digital and draw a line somewhere? We still see people talk digital and they complain, okay, I’ve got some legacy. Some of the legacy they let go, but still there is a portion of business or stakeholders fighting tooth and nail to say, I want to keep this legacy. So legacy never goes away, and you never become fully digital.

Marianne Marck [00:23:30]:

Well, that is something that almost everyone faces. The fact of the matter is when we talk about legacy, it’s really how old is it. Is it technology from the eighties and nineties, or is it more modern? I would encourage everybody to think about the fact that you don’t really have to replace everything, but you do need to expose the capabilities. So from a technology standpoint, creating a service layer on top of a legacy application, let’s say it’s a legacy inventory application, by creating a service layer and an API on top of that application, then you can unlock the information inside of it. Investing in that middle tier layer is critical for companies because the whole point is to be able to expose capability to your mobile applications and your web apps and be able to let the world get into all of those and harness the data and information inside of them. So that middle layer strategy is incredibly important.

Sanjog Aul [00:24:42]:

It also creates a facade on top of those old legacy applications.

Marianne Marck [00:24:43]:

You can then change the application, but you have that middle layer to create that abstraction so that the change-out can be managed appropriately with the right amount of change. So that’s a very important strategic consideration in all of your legacy applications. It does mean that investment in that middle tier is important.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:14]:

So what you just explained is a fantastic example of understanding the plumbing and being able to tackle it very well. But now think the customer in means an outside-in approach. When you are digital, you’re trying to go digital. You want to optimize every possible way to offer the customer a chance to engage with you in a brand new, more effective, more interactive, more engaging way. If you carry some legacy, doesn’t it pull you down a couple of notches in being able to deliver that ultimate experience to your customer, because that’s the very reason you started that journey? So even though you created your internal integration and other things, isn’t that a compromise to where you actually want it to go from a customer standpoint?

Marianne Marck [00:26:14]:

I think, of course, it depends. Most of the delightful experiences for customers require you actually setting the data and information free and delivering it on a more real-time basis. Those are some of the technology investments with streaming and back office data lakes that can actually expose information to customers in a more real-time way, because that means you’re interacting with them in real time. A lot of very high value-add features and functions for customers really operate in real time. For example, say I’m an e-commerce company. If I can show a shopper that I have that inventory and it’s available at this store, and we can package it up for pickup and it’s located near you, or we can deliver it, those are the kinds of things that really have instantaneous gratification for customers. So you have to think about that experience. It must start with a customer experience. There are times when you have to cobble things together in order to get an experiment to actually shine. If you see that it really resonated, or it did not resonate, you have to watch adoption. A lot of different companies have been experimenting with delivery and finding a smaller adoption set. Expect that to probably grow over time. In China, consumers are very used to delivery all the time, so adoption is different there. At any rate, there are times when you have to have an imperative. The imperative is incredibly important: we will do X. Everyone in the company works towards that end, and then we measure the results of that. Companies have to really watch global trends and think about what are the most delightful experiences we can create that are going to keep everybody coming back.

Sanjog Aul [00:28:50]:

One is to be able to create that experience for all parties involved. But then how do you not reduce its thunder and maximize while preserving your IT investments? Are we saying that we are able to get away with what we truly wanted? Because when you said the word imperative, isn’t that imperative subject to an individual or a group’s perception of what’s best?

Marianne Marck [00:29:40]:

You won’t get there if you don’t embrace some of those big transformations as a company. Without those big targets and big ideas, you’re not taking an appropriate amount of risk. Some companies may be too conservative. If we just keep operating this way because people have loved us for years, those companies are probably going to get caught short because they will become more and more irrelevant. Companies are competing with innovation like they never have before. So it should be an imperative to do that. It stretches your technology organizations to the extreme in some cases. When you find something that really works, frequently companies haven’t operationalized these innovations to the extent that they can operate them at scale. That’s often a challenge we find ourselves in as CIOs. It was great and it took off, but now we actually need to operate it for thousands of people or maybe even over 1,000,000 people. That’s when a lot of our really hard work begins: operationalizing a success story. At the same time, we also have to tune it to say, it’s great and super popular, are we maximizing revenue? Are we making money from this great service that we’ve provided? Is it profitable for us? Where do we need to tune it? All of those things on an ongoing basis are truly required.

Sanjog Aul [00:31:27]:

So let’s take a quick break, listeners. When we come back, let’s look at situations where things don’t go well, because you may have experimented with something that in theory made sense, but when you tried it, it did not go as well with customers. That could be a limited data point because you may not have experimented enough. If it is failing, then maybe people at the top say yes, we have to go with this and there is imperative, but people who are mid managers, for example, who are asked to experiment or conduct that experiment and bring the results back, how many times will they be allowed to bring a negative result and still be given permission to continue? How do we prevent the disconnect between an imperative to go digital and then shooting people’s ideas or experimentation down and losing patience in the process? Please stay tuned listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:34:53]:

Welcome back. So stakeholders say yes. Let’s go for it. Go digital. Experimentation starts, and not every experiment is successful. So you have to go back and report it, maybe do some tweaks. You go back and report yet again that this is not going well. How long does stakeholder or executive management stay positive after getting one bad news after another?

Marianne Marck [00:35:29]:

I think mistakes live in the historic memory of companies, and that mistake will get brought up again and again. The good things and the good intentions that the mistake started with are then trotted out all the time. That’s a true sign that a company actually hasn’t embraced failure as a way to learn and risk taking overall as an organization. Mostly, it’s because it’s the historic pain of having invested money and not getting a return on it. The pressures on companies today to show a return on investment is probably at an all-time high, as public companies must show ongoing value for shareholders, and there’s a lot of pressure on the CEO. You have to make sure those risks are measured, and you need to talk about risk upfront in projects. I’ll give you a couple of examples. One thing we did at Ritchie Bros. that I would call a great success: we sell thousands of pieces of very large equipment at our sales. At our bigger sales, we’re selling 8,000 to 10,000 pieces of equipment. We bring it all into a yard. Our big yards are over 100 acres in size. If I’m looking for equipment, I have to go out in that yard and find it. We’re incredibly organized; the equipment’s all lined up beautifully by equipment type. What we did was, on our mobile application, we put in a wayfinding tool so that a customer could put in a specific lot they’re interested in, and the map would point them and take them exactly to that piece of equipment on their mobile app. It wasn’t a huge investment, but what we didn’t think quite enough about was it took a lot of work by the yard people to create the map to begin with. So it has a big payoff for a big sale; it’s a great piece of service. Maybe it doesn’t add to revenue. It’s very convenient, but it’s a lot of work for the yard people for smaller sales, and they don’t really need it so much. That was always trotted out as where that value stream didn’t pay off, because we fund those streams every year. We actually have to develop new language for talking about the risks we’re taking upfront. Marketing and the algorithms really required us as a team to create new technology. It was brand new, and as we embarked on that, those algorithms didn’t necessarily work out the first time; they didn’t, and we had to do a lot of tuning and refining and actually change the basis of the algorithms. That’s a pretty expensive proposition. A lot of the heat comes down on the technology person’s head, but you also need tools for talking: we’re inventing something new, we’re going to have to go through a pilot phase. Does everyone have the stomach for the risk we’re going to take as we invent these new capabilities? Truly innovative technology companies have experimentation in their DNA, and that’s why in some cases they make very significant investments in technology. If you recall, Amazon operated without producing a profit for many years, but in that process they developed truly cutting-edge technologies. We have to really prepare our leadership for the risks that we’re going to take when we’re inventing something new, the challenges that may occur, and then if it’s brought up again as an antidote to failure, we can also have the words to say: it was a risk, we took a risk, this is what we learned, and this is how we apply that going forward.

Sanjog Aul [00:40:43]:

What you just mentioned almost seems to convey that the technology leader has to take the protagonist’s role in getting an innovation through. But if you look at any digital initiative before you slap technology on it, it has to have some underlying process changes or improvements or transformation. That means your business unit leader has to first step up and ask the same question in a different context: do you have the stomach, can you handle this change in process or change in the way we do business before the technology person says, this is what technology can do for you? So who is supposed to lead with the baton and then pass it along to the next group? What would work best?

Marianne Marck [00:41:43]:

Well, absolutely, the most successful transformations are team efforts. They must be a partnership of product, operations, and marketing. The operations folks need to be really well informed of any risks. The marketing team needs to get very excited about what we’re going to be doing for customers. It has to be a team play. I think a lot of technologists can sometimes forget this. I know I do. I often get so excited about the technology pieces of it; it’s part of our DNA. We always have to remember that at the end, that transformation really happens when it’s successfully rolled out to customers. That means everybody has to go the distance, do the rollout, be very collaborative in their design. Those are the projects that are really successful, where everybody’s pulling together to make it a success. It’s really a partnership from the very beginning. Every technologist has to work side by side with their product leader or their marketing leader to describe what the outcomes are going to be, describe the risks, create that product vision, and then describe how we’re going to get there. That requires a very deep partnership with those teams.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:26]:

So imagine you experimented in one area. We’ll take a quick break and come back and discuss this, but I want to set the context. If you started the journey and said, yes, this is not going to be a holistic change in one shot, but you go partial mode, that means you’re going to deploy technology, change some processes, and literally go and do this partial rip and replace. Then comes the time when you start looking at another piece, and it might dawn on you that you have to do something more, meaning you have to rip and replace again. All of this is very expensive. Are you saying that if we go the bite-size approach, we have to be ready to take a significant chunk of throwaway work, or should we expect that there will be a lot of throwaway work before we reach that holy grail? Is that how digital transformation will come about, or can we be smarter about it? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Sanjog Aul [00:46:37]:

Welcome back. The whole idea about going digital successfully is we have to start somewhere. We go partial, then we might go to the next phase, but what you did in the first cut could be throwaway work or it’ll have to be ripped and replaced again. That means a lot of leakage and a lot of money spent to finally reach the holy grail. Can we be smarter in approaching this?

Marianne Marck [00:47:08]:

I think one of the things that gets in the way of being smarter is that sense of urgency, which can be overwhelming, and it’s hard to see beyond the next target capability or enhancement. One of the things required from the team as a whole is we design customer experiences and think about what is going to be the most value. As we think about the back end, how we’re going to expose that value on an ongoing basis, throwaway work will definitely be part of it. You have to accept some of that, because as we do a prototype and expose it, we may need to throw some technology away. As it becomes popular, it’s worth an ongoing investment. That is a challenge. It’s more important to think about the eventuality of if we provide this experience, what will people want next? What will add a lot of value to that? To plan a little beyond that first hill is pretty critical. In my experience there is always a little bit of throwaway work, but it’s important to see it as you’re undertaking it and be a little more predictive around what you’re going to have to do.

Sanjog Aul [00:48:53]:

So there are two things at play here. One, you go partial consciously. Second is the very definition of what you see as digital. For that matter, the customer’s definition of digital is morphing. So the throwaway work is not going to be any less going forward because innovation and customer expectations keep shifting.

Marianne Marck [00:49:33]:

I do think we have to make deliberate decisions about which investments are short term and which ones are longer term. When you said the phrase digital new to digital now, digital new is an innovation we’re trying for the first time. Digital now means we actually have a channel, an online channel, a mobile channel. Those are longer term investments and require a different level of ongoing investment to unlock value for customers. When we think about how to govern and manage these, we have to consider that we’re going to be paying for these things on an ongoing basis, and we’re going to be measuring and managing the revenue that comes from them. Companies need to realize you didn’t just pay an outside firm to build a mobile app and be done. It requires ongoing investment. It’s like having a baby, you need to take care of it for a while. If we see we’re throwing things at a wall and seeing what sticks, we actually have to look at our strategy. We have to go back and see how effective the things we’ve put out are. We need a good pipeline process for looking at ideas and determining which ones merit investment to take live as products. That innovation pipeline and governance structure are very important. The throwaway work can be demoralizing to teams, so you have to look closely at what it takes to operate and operationalize innovations. That’s an area where backroom teams can be scrambling and can’t effectively maintain things. Things will break, customers will get dissatisfied. Your portfolio has to balance spending the money to operationalize critical things and reserving some for new innovation. That’s a big challenge for companies.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:42]:

One last question: most companies are fearing dipping their toe or swimming in digital because they don’t know how they will manage governance. As you change aspects of your business, the governance model shifts. Governance brings stability, and if you’ve got a moving target of what governance means, how will we manage it? We have less than a minute.

Marianne Marck [00:53:19]:

Alright. I think most companies are finding themselves in two modes. The traditional mode is that you have operations, and then you have capital for investment, and that capital goes to projects. For the last 8 years, I’ve worked in a model where that is partially true maybe for 1/2 or 2/3 of your capital but the other part of your capital is reserved for improvements made by dedicated teams devoted to your digital channels: a factory and a product team that work closely together, governed by consistent readouts and a measurement of revenue returns on those channels. I think most of us are in that kind of model today. It’s very important that in that product model it shows back: here’s where we are being effective and how we are being effective.

Sanjog Aul [00:54:35]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, I would like to really thank you, Mary Anne, because this is not an easy topic. We know we are all struggling with it, but you beautifully handled it, and I’m sure listeners will get a lot of value from your thoughts. So thanks so much and hope organizations will be able to move forward and effectively shift from digital new to now. Thank you.

Marianne Marck [00:55:02]:

Thank you, Sanjog.

Sanjog Aul [00:55:04]:

And listeners, hope you enjoyed it and got a lot of value out of it. Listen to us through our podcast. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Join our LinkedIn community and go ahead and join us for many more shows ahead. This is our last show for 2017, so happy new year to everyone. Thank you again for listening to this segment on CTN. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week. Take care and God bless.