Leading Through Digital Disruption Assignment Sample

Introduction

Skyrocketing digital transformation becomes challenging for every company across every industry. IN order to get competitive advantages and meet emerging demands of customers, every company is now adopting digital transformation (Liu et. al. 2021). Likewise, Nike, a footwear manufacturing company, also adopts digital transformation. The present report describes the case for change of the chosen company along with suggestions to adopt Business Agility Model to enhance their transformation process.

Task 1: The case for change

Nike is an US based multinational company that is involved in the design, developing, manufacturing, marketing and sales of footwear, sport accessories, equipment, and related services. The company covers a large area of the market across the world as they operate in Europe, Middle East & Africa, North America, Asia Pacific & Latin, and America. Overall, they operate in more than 170 countries in the world. Since, the company’s operations are at a very large scale (Dhesi, 2021). Hence, it becomes important to adopt digitalization in order to make their processes smooth and effective. Thus, the company has put digitalization in the core of its strategy and named them as a ‘Customer Direct Offence’. Through this they plan to enhance its digital market, increase online direct sales and reduce wholesale businesses from some parts.

However, Nike already started digitalization in their company but after the pandemic they boosted their digital strategy more rigorously and they message to their customer that it is ‘New Normal’. The company develops new digital space for their customers to connect with the brand’s big influencers like the high performer sports person (Stangl, 2021). During the pandemic chaos they bring several new digital offers like Livestream workouts, Digital Fitness Challenges, and new ecosystems. The company leveraged 11% revenues from these strategies during the Pandemic. Other than that, the company announced data integration start-up Dialogue in order to accelerate customer-led digital transformation. They are also involved in Customer Direct Acceleration planning which improves communication with customers through direct selling medium. It also enables to transform raw data into valuable insight to improve digital momentum (Essinger et. al. 2021). Therefore, it can be said that the reason behind the digital transformation of Nike is the emergence of e-commerce and Covid-19. As they already start to move their steps towards digitalization, the global pandemic influences them to aggressively adopt digital strategy in order to get competitive advantages and become market leader.

The below are presenting the objectives of Nike’s digital transformation:

To accelerate customer engagement with the company during the pandemic.
To transform their operations towards more effective ways and establish direct selling practices.
To reduce retail and wholesale operation by generalising online selling and reducing additional operating cost.
To get competitive advantages and meet customer expectations along with increasing brand equity.

Task 2: Achieving digital business agility

Nike embraced digitalization to becomes agile and flexible as per the market trends. Under their digital strategy the company starts to increase their presence in several mobile apps and social platforms (Correani et. al. 2020). It enables the development of an ecosystem that associates social components with e-commerce apps and converts customer’s interest into sales. Further, the company leverage its digital ecosystem to gather customer data in every interaction through its various mediums in order to identify customer expectations and preferences about new products and designs. The firm also introduce a library of digital workouts and resources including Nike Training Club App, Nike App, and Running Club App, and more.

Hence, such initiatives towards digitalization makes them agile and competitive (Cicerchia, 2021). However, digital technologies are often changes and adopting every change is very complicated. In order to deal with such frequent updates in technologies, the Global Centre for Digital Business Transformation 2018, suggest digital business agility model which provides valuable insights about how the company should be agile while transforming their operations. Digital business agility model helps the company to quickly adopt, experiment, and implement new changes, systems, and processes. The three main component of agility model is discussing below:

Figure 1: Digital Business Agility Model

Hyperawareness- It shows how much the company is aware about market trends, internal and external environments which can affect their decision-making process and potential risks which adversely impact their organizational goals (Wade, 2022). Further, hyperaware companies are able to identify, monitor, and understand the impact of market changes. However, it is difficult for the company to identify all risks because uncertainty is the part of business from which every company gets affected. Nike faces tough competition because there are more powerful players in the market like Adidas, Woodland, and more. Thus, it can suggest that the company should use Internet of Things techniques to conduct deep market research. The company should use various social media platforms to research customer preferences, Google Trends to know about market latest trends and mail research forms to know customer preferences and competitors’ strategy (Davenport and Westermann, 2018). Hence, IoT techniques enable the company to remain hyperaware.

Informed decisions– Informed decision components enable the company to effectively use raw data. For that purpose, Nike uses a data ecosystem to collect customer data at every interaction and convert them into valuable insights. Other than that, the company should use Augmented and Virtual reality techniques to provide live experience to their customers and stakeholders about new products (Daradkeh et. al. 2018). Hence, their feedback and suggestions enable them to make new products effective and competitive. Further, it increases their agility and flexibility as per the customer expectations.

Fast execution- It means that the company can execute their strategy as per the insight and research outcomes. However, employee and stakeholder resistance make it challenging. Additionally, fast execution increases the probability of mistakes and manual working error (Lee and Moon, 2021). In order to overcome these challenges, the company should use Artificial Intelligence and machine learning techniques where most of the work becomes automated and the chance of human error can be reduced.

These three components of the agility model enable the company to implement its digital strategy in a more successful manner. However, technologies are frequently changing hence, it can suggest that they should always be aware of market conditions and be prepared to adopt new changes.

Conclusion

The present report concluded that Nike, a multinational footwear and sport accessories dealer adopt digitalization due to emerging e-commerce popularity and overcome from pandemic challenges. The report describes the case for change of Nike along with suggesting a business agility model to successfully implement their digitalization strategy and achieve their objectives.

References

Cicerchia, S., (2021). The digital transformation in the sneaker market: Nike’s in-store customer experience.

Correani, A., De Massis, A., Frattini, F., Petruzzelli, A.M. and Natalicchio, A., (2020). Implementing a digital strategy: Learning from the experience of three digital transformation projects. California Management Review, 62(4), pp.37-56.

Daradkeh, Y., Gouveia, L. and Sen, S., (2018). Strategic Thinking and Brands move to the Digital transformation. Matter: International Journal of Science and Technology, 4(1), pp.88-105.

Davenport, T.H. and Westerman, G., (2018). Why so many high-profile digital transformations fail. Harvard Business Review, 9, p.15.

Dhesi, A.S., (2021). Sustaining Digital Transformation in the Post-COVID Era: Nike Case Study (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).

Essinger, S., Huber, D. and Tang, D., (2021), September. AIR: Personalized Product Recommender System for Nike’s Digital Transformation. In Fifteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (pp. 530-532).

Lee, J. and Moon, I.Y., (2021). Research on Digital Twin Automation Techniques in the Construction Industry through 2D Design Drawing Data Extraction and 3D Spatial Data Construction. In Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference (pp. 609-612). The Korea Institute of Information and Commucation Engineering.

Liu, J., Liu, Y. and Zhang, Q., (2021), September. How Firms Go Digital? The Digital Transformation Path Analysis——Evidence from Nike. In 2021 International Conference on Financial Management and Economic Transition (FMET 2021) (pp. 560-567). Atlantis Press.

Stangl, L.J.M., (2021). Digital Transformation in the Sports Apparel Industry. The Case of Nike, Inc. GRIN Verlag.

Wade, R., (2022). Digital business agility and workforce transformation. [Online] [Available Through]: <https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/digital-business-agility-and-workforce-transformation/>

Appendix

Self-evaluation

*Task*	*Self-assessment*
Task 1- The case for change	I present Nike’s company’s operation, market presence, and reason behind digital transformation in detail. Further, I provide a comprehensive objective of the company. Hence, I expect merit from this task.
Task 2- Achieving digital business agility	I meet all requirements of this task as I give a detailed explanation of digital business agility models and their three components. Further, I critically suggest the techniques and its implementation. Hence, I expect distinction marks.