No longer a question of “if”, but a question of “now”: digital transformation has become a necessary change for any company that wants to succeed and stand out in the market. Presence in digital media is no longer a point of differentiation to a point of parity: the minimum for a company to survive.

                For this transformation to be carried out in the best way possible, the company must acquire capabilities focused on the digital world. Online markets differ from offline ones, and the company must excel in both. The question that remains, then, is: what are these very important capabilities that must be acquired by organizations?

                Fortunately for us entrepreneurs, this question was one of the focuses of the book “What's Your Digital Business Model?”, by Peter Weill and Stephanie Woerner. The authors describe 8 organizational capabilities for the enterprises of the future. Below is an analysis of each of them.

• Acquire great information about their consumers : Companies must use a digital tool to obtain information from their consumers. What are your needs, and which of them can be solved with your company? What are your interests? Your birthday? And, as important as obtaining the information, knowing how to use it to strengthen the relationship with the customer.
• Amplify the voice of the consumer in the organization : Measuring consumer satisfaction with the company has become basic. For organizations undergoing transformation, the idea is to place the customer at the center of the company: every meeting, decision, product and action within the company must be accompanied by the question “what would our customer think of this?” ”. How to know? Return to the first capacity.
• Create a culture of evidence-based decisions : instinct and experience guide the decisions of many entrepreneurs, and eventually result in success. However, for the company to have more accurate results, it is extremely necessary to create an environment and culture based on evidence: data must be more important than opinions.
• Promote an integrated, multi-product and multi-channel customer experience : to serve consumers excellently, companies must stop using the concept of “push supply” to work with “pull demand”: creating communication channels, products and services based on the needs of its customers.
• Be distinctive, the first place your customer remembers : When identifying a need, your customer should remember your company first. Think about the following questions: What makes your company different from its competitors? And how can this point be exploited to make it the company that is first remembered in times of need?
• Identify and develop great partnerships and acquisitions : Identifying and solving consumer needs becomes easier when we have effective business partners. Therefore, it becomes extremely important to identify market players, thinking about the customer's journey with your company (purchase, shipping, payment, etc.) and aiming to resolve the customer's needs in an excellent way.
• Transform your differentiations into services (via APIs) : much of what makes digital transformation great is the speed of information, which has enabled great openness to open innovation. So, after defining how to serve your customers and what makes your company unique, make this knowledge digital and concrete in the form of APIs . This way, it becomes easier to improve the differences found, thus improving the customer experience.
• Develop skills linked to efficiency, security and compliance : leaders of companies undergoing transformation need to recognize potential areas of efficiency, responsibilities and threats. Privacy and data protection, cyber threats, service dysfunctions are some of the problems that can be faced over time, and a company must be able to resolve them in the best possible way.

None of these business capabilities are easy to acquire, which has its good side: once acquired and applied in the company's day-to-day activities, they become competitive differentiators in the market, bringing prominence to the organization.

In summary: data collection and analysis, customer focus and skills linked to digital transformation (such as efficiency and compliance ) are increasingly becoming decisive factors for the success and growth of companies in the fourth industrial revolution. It is up to leaders and entrepreneurs to understand and apply this knowledge as quickly as possible, before the digital tide covers their company.