Digital initiatives unlock synergies within a conglomerate business

With the digital revolution altering the business world across industries, conglomerates must develop effective digital strategies to preserve their leading position across their businesses or risk being challenged by more agile competitors. Digital transformation enables organizations to build a digital infrastructure that allows them to remain at the forefront of innovation and growth. Companies are now implementing these technologies to solve the difficulties while also providing potential for synergy within the conglomerate.

Conglomerate organizations are by definition diverse operations. They have several business units that may be isolated and disparate, and it is essential that they are aligned with the overarching conglomerate strategy. These companies leverage a common core of services to serve their many business segments in a consistent and efficient manner. While managing these common core of services, and as individual businesses strive to excel, these businesses face a variety of challenges when aligning their operations to their overall business strategies. These challenges can be:

• Lack of transparency: The conglomerates executives, stakeholders and individual businesses may not have a unified perspective of the organization. This can lead to reduced coordination and resulting opportunity costs requiring various approaches to leveraging right data for decision making.
• Redundant initiatives and operations: In absence of a common framework of managing initiatives relating to the conglomerate’s strategy, different business units will have their own manner of managing operations that may or may not be in sync with other units of the organization. This also implies that efforts being wasted, as well as a disorganized work management system. This can results in below-par execution and lower productivity.
• Compromised customer trust: Conglomerates’ key pain issue is inconsistent messaging to the end customer. Business units will engage with their customers in different ways, using different messaging, which may undermine customer trust and add to user confusion. This makes it harder to engage the customer.

To overcome these challenges, such organizations must manage the common core of services better, as well as establish frameworks for coordination, decision making and execution. Conglomerates thus can integrate their business unit strategies to the broader group strategy using business technologies such as business analytics and applications for managing initiatives and delivering services. This enables them to make sound investment decisions, use collective resources, and consolidate their knowledge.

Digital initiatives provide many opportunities for businesses to manage and coordinate their projects with their respective business divisions. For example, by utilizing cloud based common collaboration and work management solutions, these firms may implement shared objectives, share knowledge and insights, boost collaboration across separate companies, and provide an uniform engagement system for their consumers and stakeholders. These are just some opportunities that can be leveraged with digital transformation. 

• Unified business insights: Data from disparate business units can be combined and unified into a single meaningful data set. This data set can be tailored to the conglomerate’s needs and can aid in the collection of important business insights that can be used to make better business decisions.
• KPI aggregation: By centralizing Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) from various business units, businesses can have a set of ultimate KPIs that are matched with conglomerate level plans and KPIs. This also suggests that general initiatives should be aligned with organizational strategies. As a result, a trackable and quantitative indicator of business objective achievement is created.
• Comprehensive customer insights: Having a comprehensive customer insight data improves the process of generating marketing and sales strategies. These customer insights can assist businesses gain a deep understanding of who their consumers are and what their wants are, allowing them to adapt to the client’s individual needs.
• Strategic project management: Conglomerates must have a consistent, strategic, and systematized project management system across all business units. This allows them to unify their work management and ensure that projects are completed on schedule and with high quality. Conglomerates can monitor client interaction and work status, as well as discover areas where firms are suffering slower execution.
• Unified digital presence: Synchronized company presence across systems and organizations helps keep the overall messaging delivered across the board in a uniform manner, offering a secure and successful customer engagement system that benefits both the user and the service provider.
• Collaborative and interactive work environment: With the digitization of business management, teams across the organization can collaborate and connect with one another, assisting them in aligning their strategies, creating a cohesive work environment, increasing productivity, and making better, informed decisions. 

These digital initiatives are crucial for businesses to benefit from each other, make better decisions, improve their strategy execution while keeping their customers engaged and informed. These synergies enable businesses to focus better on growth and overall organizational goals.