A digital ecosystem is an integrated system of business and technical entities that come together through digital collaboration to deliver business value to all its participants, including customers. Working in ecosystem provides opportunities for all participants to find more revenue opportunities. For example, a retail giant like Amazon.com’s ecosystem comprises of different suppliers, banks, warehouses, customer service centers, etc. all tied in an integrated digital system to provide value and meaningful customer experience to its customers. Another example is that of Mechanical Turk that is an online marketplace, also by Amazon, that brings freelance service providers and businesses together in an ecosystem to facilitate work in a collaborative fashion.
Building a digital business ecosystem and / or participating in a digital ecosystem is an essential reality of the new digital world. All businesses looking to go digital must understand the realities of the digital ecosystems related to their industries and must know how to effectively participate in one to be able to contribute relevant business value.
Building a digital ecosystem requires a number of factors. The following delineates some of those. (Video tutorial courses related to building digital ecosystems are available for all the following topics.)
- The necessity for digital businesses to participate in a digital ecosystem
- Understand your industry’s digital ecosystem
- Understand your competitor’s digital ecosystem
- Understand how value is created in your participating digital ecosystem
- Define the value created as part of your business’s digital ecosystem
- Build online communities of customers and partners
- Design an integrated architecture of your ecosystem
- Build the technological foundation for your digital ecosystem
- Build and ensure seamless interoperability between ecosystem participants
- Identify the content in use across your digital system
- Create a content management strategy that works across your entire ecosystem
- Identify the suite of services across your digital system
- Identify ecosystem business processes and your business’s role in the overall ecosystem
- Identify all customer and partner digital touchpoints
- Understanding the digital technologies required to build digital ecosystems.
- Identify metrics to measure the effectiveness of your ecosystem
- End to end digitalization of business ecosystems
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