TL;DR
Contextual understanding is the backbone of any digital strategy. In order to create contextual understanding we need to produce insights for the components of our business' context. In order to effectively use the insights we produce we need to map and illustrate our insights into a format that can easily be reused and built upon.
What is business context?
Every digital strategy operates within a complicated system. This system is comprised of the resources available to us, our current and potential customer segments, communication channels, our competitors, wider societal trends, exsisting/potential partners, suppliers and technology. Each of these components are complicated, volatile and continually interacting with one other.
It is this system — its components and their relationships to one another — that creates our context. Mapping out our context enables us to make informed decisions on the best course of action for us to take. Therefore contextual awareness is the backbone of any digital strategy.
Why does context matter?
An effective context allows us to represent and understand a complicated system easily. We need look no further than the periodic table of elements we studied in high-school to see the benefits of an effectively structured context. The inventor of the periodic table Dmitri Mendeleev organised the elements based on their atomic mass, which allowed even the casual observer to quickly understand how elements are related to one another. For experienced chemists, the table enables the correct predicition of how undiscovered elements will behave.
By distilling elemental science down to a single page, Mendeleev created a context that drastically impacted on the rate of innovation within chemistry. Such is the power of an insightful and simply communicated context.
Our business can benefit from a simply communicated context as much as chemistry did from the periodic table. To effectively map our organisation's context we need to:
Producing insights
Insights allow us to better understand a component within our context. We may produce insights on any component within our context; what our competition is doing, our customer's behaviors, interviews with various stakeholders etc.
In order to effectively produce insights we are fortunate in that we can leverage one of the biggest drivers of technological innovation, the scientific method. By applying the scientific method to any component within our business' context we can systematically understand the component and articulate our understanding as a set of insights.
Mapping insights
Insights are only powerful when they are acted upon. In order to leverage, question, revise and build on our understanding of our organisation’s context, we need to be able to reference our context at all times. We need to map the various insights from our components into an easily understood document like the periodic table.
Mapping our insights into a single illustration forces us to reflect only the most crucial insights for our business. The illustration needs to be as simple to grasp as the periodic table, while at the same time encompassing the breadth and depth of the collective understanding we have of our organisational context.
Too often organisations produce well informed insights that are presented once (usually immediately after research has been conducted) and never again see the light of day. They become trapped in the middle of an overbearing PowerPoint deck that no one has the time to read through. In order to be masters of our organisation’s context we need extract these insights into a simple and visible format. In order to map our insights we can leverage any number of tools such as customer journey maps, taxonomies, user journeys, service blueprints etc.
Conclusion
It's impossible to create an effective digital strategy without contextual understanding as:
- Context helps us create digital strategies as it gives us a map of our oganisation's environment
- A useful context is comprised of insights gathered from evidence-based research and effective illustration
- To effectively act on our insights we need to map and illustrate them clearly.