Digital Advisory Boards for Businesses

Digital Advisory Boards to Ensure Long-Term Success

The implementation of digital advisory boards is critical to your company’s success – especially when you consider that 83% of board members in German family businesses have no digital experience. Only 25% of German companies consider themselves to be digitalized and while 70% of all digital transformation initiatives do not reach their goals as companies lack expertise and resources.

Introducing a digital advisory board is an effective approach to ensure that digital projects receive adequate business consideration. Digital consultants or specialists who have been brought in for specific projects or digital transformations are two examples of potential external board members.

The overarching goal of all digital advisory boards is to devise and execute a business’s digital strategy in conjunction with the wider business’s goals, budgets and plans. The functional role of digital boards can flex to suit each organisation but we like to break the board’s operational process down into four pillars: Constant evaluation of digital product development and USPs, product strategy and digital roadmap assessment, evaluation of digital market trends, digital product competitiveness and target screening, and the introduction of an expert-driven innovation incubator.

Graph showing the percentage of digital competencies in top German family businesses

The overall purpose of a digital advisory board is to ensure that digital projects are going according to plan, achieving digital KPIs and that they are the right steps for the organisation. Importantly, each digital board should have one or two leaders that are able to sit on the wider corporate directors board or, at minimum, consult with the company board.
By having a seat at the table with the corporate directors, digital board leaders are able to introduce key digital expertise to boards that often sorely lack the adequate relevant knowledge to execute business plans with solid integrated digital tactics.
With the digital world innovating and scaling at such a fast pace, senior leaders rarely have the time or capacity to adequately educate themselves on digital innovation and trends. Perhaps more concerning than this, many senior business leaders don’t even know that they lack any necessary digital expertise.

Companies with digital advisory boards have experts on-hand to consult to guide those vital decisions on how they invest their budget into tech. Ideally, a digital board will be able to offer a balanced perspective and weigh the company’s current offering and financial status with their expert understanding of the value of ongoing or planned digital projects, relative to the business’s current economic situation.

Digital advisory boards offer a simple way for businesses to keep up with a changing world, and position themselves for success in a digital future. While competitors may pause their digital investments until they feel more economically secure, taking the decision to build upon your digital offering internally and externally can help you to retain staff amid a skills crisis and draw in new customers. A digital advisory board including OMMAX experts and experts from the Advisor and Expert Network will help in leading a company board through this process.