The way companies allocate resources and make investment decisions is critical to their ability to create shareholder value. Our past work has focused on the pervasive problems of biases and inertia in resource allocation—and found that when these challenges are overcome, companies can see a lot of value as a result.1But far less investigation has addressed the more practical side of investment decision making: the very tactical practices companies use to reach their decisions, such as the steps they take to provide decision makers with information they need and how they sequence their strategic-planning activities. 

Digital is reshaping customer experience in almost every sector. Digital first attackers are entering markets with radically new offers, disrupting the ways that companies and customers interact and setting a high bar for simplicity, personalization, and interactivity.

To not only stay in the game but capture new sources of value, incumbents will need to reinvent their customer experience. That begins with bringing in data and analytics-based insights about what really matters to customers and how best to deliver it to them. Some companies fail to capture the full benefits of their improvement efforts because they concentrate on optimizing individual touchpoints rather than tackling the customer experience as customers actually experience it—a complete journey that cuts across multiple functions and channels.

Since the financial crisis of 2007–09, many companies have applied lean management to improve cost efficiencies, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement simultaneously, and many programs have achieved substantial impact on all dimensions. Progress on digital, however, has been more uneven.

A North American bank took less than two years to shift 30 percent of its in-branch customer traffic to digital channels and dramatically reduce its brick-and-mortar footprint. A European cruise line redesigned and relaunched five core products in nine months to increase digital conversions by three to five times and sales by 150 percent.