Digital Platforms: Why Are They Crucial For Business Growth?

Digital platforms are no longer just a strategy for tech-savvy start-ups. They are now a must for any organization. “Businesses which do not embrace platforms risk being left behind by their competitors, who see them as a need and a foundation for new value generation,” says Accenture in a report. As a result, digital platforms are no longer the exclusive realm of tech-savvy millennials. 

As their business models mature, companies such as Amazon, Nike, and Facebook have introduced their platforms. Successful platforms are founded on technological brilliance, but they cannot operate solely in the technological area. They rely largely on buy-in and suggestions from other departments of the organization, which is best organized through a cross-functional team that defines success measures and tracks progress.

To achieve this delicate balance, central leadership that establishes the vision communicates successes, and mobilizes the required staff; and ‘product owners’ who are responsible for driving success in their individual emphasis areas, must be carefully controlled.

What is a Digital Platform?

Digital platforms are web-based solutions that allow numerous tasks to be completed at once. There are a number of activities and metrics to keep track of while building an effective digital marketing plan in order to increase your online visibility. Everything is more expensive and difficult to achieve when there is no Digital Platform.

3 Core Benefits of Digital platform

Network Effects

Network effects, a term coined by economists, is the reason why internet giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have been so successful. To put it simply, as more people join a network or service, the more valuable it becomes to those individuals who utilize it.

Difficult Competition

By minimizing the need to constantly speed up a huge amount of promotion, the two-sided platform, which brings vendors and consumers together, can be an effective strategy to keep competitors out of the market and hinder their success.

Value Creation

A business’s Platform Strategy focuses on providing value to its clients while also collecting revenue. It is possible for platforms like Facebook to double the amount of money paid by users and use that attention to promote their services.

Digital Platform Challenges Every Business Should Know About

• Using the full potential of online resources
• Connectivity and equipment
• Time-constraints
• Face-to-face communication is lacking
• Cooperativism on the platform

A digital platform must align the company’s work to all the channels.. If the systems are not meticulously integrated, the business can encounter serious problems. Businesses often rely on digital platform solutions to make the business sustainable.

 

Here are some of the platform solutions that your business might need:

Digital Platform Solutions

• Identity Management Solution: To keep track of and limit access to company resources, identity management software is used. Overall, identity and access management software is designed to improve security and staff efficiency. For instance, Microsoft Azure’s Active Directory single sign in gives simultaneous access to 2,800 SaaS apps. The vendors, stakeholders can easily access data in a secured manner. 
• Role-Based Access Control Solution: Role-Based Access Control, or RBAC, is a way of limiting access to data based on a user’s position within the organization. Only the resources and files necessary to carry out their duties are accessible through RBAC. For example, while publishing a Cooperative Computing Blog, the blog writer doesn’t have access to editing articles by other writers. 
• System Integration Solution: As the name suggests, system integration is the act of bringing together several separate subsystems or components into a single bigger system that allows them to work together. The absolute example is Instagram integration with Facebook. The users can easily switch between both companies for private messages.
• Data Warehousing Solution: You need a flexible foundation that has been tuned to collect and analyze large amounts of data from many sources to assist your business intelligence projects and speed up decision-making. Alibaba is operating with more than 700 robots in their warehouse for quicker decision-making. 
• Billing & Payment Solution: A fraction of the expense of an in-house solution and the ability to serve consumers who want to pay in person but are out of your geographic area are just some of the advantages of using a third-party service. The several payment solutions in the market are customized as per the requirements of individual businesses.
• Catalog management solution: Managing a brand’s entire library of SKUs in a buyer’s preferred format is a key component of catalog management. Amazon catalog processing solutions use consumer behavior to make recommendations for individual users. 
• Communication Engine: Create customized, targeted messages with our communication engine and send them to your workers at any time and anywhere with our app. Cooperative Computing has developed an internal communication solution that makes internal communication easy.

 

The future is all digital. Digital technologies transform how we live and work, from the Cloud and machine intelligence to Blockchain technology and Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT). To survive the digital revolution, companies need to be digitally mature. And the first step towards maturity is aligning your digital platforms.