Digital Portfolio Management

Digital Business Operations 

AI and digital technologies hold immense potential to revolutionize business operations. By streamlining workflows, minimizing manual tasks, and creating competitive advantages, these technologies empower companies to address operational inefficiencies and elevate customer experiences. However, many organizations initially focus on isolated AI solutions that target specific points in their processes. This approach often yields only marginal efficiency gains (10-20%) and struggles to scale across the broader enterprise. In some cases, it even leads to significant resource expenditure to rectify downstream issues caused by inefficiencies in siloed upstream business processes. 

To drive meaningful transformation, leading companies are shifting towards a digital portfolio management structure. This holistic approach involves decomposing end-to-end (E2E) business process taxonomies (e.g., lead-to-cash, procure-to-pay, etc.), identifying value-driven business opportunities, and leveraging digital capabilities to enable new operating models. By considering business services, workforce needs, and the strategic application of AI and digital solutions across the entire value chain, organizations can achieve transformative improvements, often realizing efficiency gains of 30-100%.

Digital Portfolio Management

A critical first step in building a digital portfolio is establishing a framework that provides visibility into relevant E2E process taxonomies and overlays specific business opportunities onto corresponding process "tiles." This allows for comprehensive assessment of process ownership, maturity, value impact, and high priority targets. By mapping digital opportunities to the E2E process taxonomy, organizations can identify synergies, pinpoint areas where the greatest impact will be realized, and effectively align upstream process stages with digital efforts. This foundation enables the development of value estimates for cost savings, efficiency improvements, and revenue growth by leveraging benchmarks from similar initiatives and conducting manual work assessments of current processes.

With a structured portfolio, digital opportunities can be categorized according to business strategies such as operational improvements, revenue growth, or customer experience. These opportunities can then be grouped into broader business transformation initiatives, including alignment to global services or shared services to business functions. Viewing digital opportunities by strategy across the process taxonomy makes initiatives more tangible, especially when value estimates are paired with relevant insights and benchmarks. A fully cataloged digital portfolio may contain hundreds of improvement opportunities spanning multiple business functions and taxonomies. Notably, cross-functional opportunities that touch two or more taxonomies can reveal "value pools," where significant cost savings or revenue growth can be achieved.

Effective digital portfolio governance, led by E2E process leadership and a steering team, enables continuous portfolio reviews and prioritization of digital opportunities from a capital investment standpoint. As digital strategies are funded and transformation initiatives (comprising multiple digital opportunities) are launched, implementation teams can align project activities to these opportunities and strategies, tracking expenditures, milestones, and progress. This ensures regular updates to the digital portfolio management governance team. Additionally, IT teams can map relevant technology use cases and digital components to business opportunities and strategies, ensuring alignment with overall solution development and execution.

Case Study

A global life sciences company was challenged with limited visibility into various digital initiatives across corporate and business unit functions. They sought to establish a digital portfolio aligned with business value drivers to meet aggressive cost-saving goals. Many of the digital efforts under consideration or already in progress were focused on specific downstream process gaps, without addressing upstream business processes. This lack of cross-functional visibility into the E2E process taxonomy hindered the digital governance council's ability to effectively manage the strategic portfolio and realize significant value through automation and AI.

To address challenges, the company assessed seven business functions across fourteen process taxonomies to identify and summarize digital opportunities across the E2E processes. The team performed a process decomposition, mapping new digital opportunities to the taxonomies, and identifying synergies and gaps across processes. Once the opportunities were clearly defined and aligned with relevant benchmarks and value drivers, the team categorized the portfolio, highlighting high-impact areas and benefits across key "mega-process" views. They also reviewed in-flight initiatives to explore potential realignment and assessed upcoming initiatives for consideration under the E2E portfolio.

With the digital portfolio established, the team collaborated closely with the Digital Governance Steering Team and initiated additional collaboration with cross-functional teams. After further refinement and review across the functional teams, the company launched a pilot program, focusing on select E2E process initiatives made of the digital opportunities at both the corporate global business services level and within a specific business unit.

How StratosView Can Help

StratosView offers comprehensive support for digital ideation, portfolio creation, initiative alignment, and establishing digital portfolio governance.

Transformational Ideation – We assist in reviewing and assessing your E2E process stages, identifying automation opportunities, and defining logical groupings of digital initiatives and business strategies. After outlining these opportunities, we help refine their scope, goals, and value estimates based on efficiency, effectiveness, and experience. We also map these opportunities to the E2E process taxonomy, framing a clear portfolio view across relevant process areas.

Building the Digital Portfolio – Using the digital overlays, we help formulate business strategies and group digital opportunities into initiatives. We assess the people, process, and technology impact of each opportunity, determining feasibility based on maturity and change impact. This enables us to create an initial portfolio aligned to value-driven business strategies. We then collaborate with your teams to prioritize opportunities based on impact and complexity, cataloging them with key value attributes and process taxonomy updates.

Initiative Alignment & Portfolio Governance – We review in-flight initiatives, aligning them to process taxonomies and identifying synergies within the digital portfolio. We help define initiatives that support common strategies and digital opportunities. Finally, we assist in establishing a Digital Governance Steering Team, outlining roles and responsibilities, and establishing a regular digital portfolio review cadence to ensure alignment across corporate shared services and business unit levels.