CIO Bulletin

A boutique consulting firm helping mid-sized to enterprise organizations identify and execute digital growth opportunities: dPrism

dPrism knows why you’re here. Maybe you have a product that’s losing market share, and you need help. Perhaps you have a 30-year-old infrastructure that you’re looking to replace. Maybe you see competitors with more agility, able to do things more quickly than you can, or meet customer needs you’re struggling with. Or perhaps you want to develop new products and services, but you’re not sure how. dPrism talk a lot around here about digital transformation, and many of its clients find them because they’ve hooked onto those buzzwords and believe that’s what they need. dPrism has written before about how becoming digital isn’t really about technology, and that’s absolutely true — it’s about a central reliance on data and research, and about systems that connect and interact across your organization.

Along those same lines, as a consultancy built around digital transformation, people assume it is offering technology solutions, but that’s not what it believes is central to the value it provides. At dPrism’s core, it offers creative and innovative solutions to business problems, not just technology problems — and it does so because of its experience as operators and expertise from actually sitting in your shoes, not just having spent its careers as outsiders giving advice and hoping it works. dPrism knows there are plenty of business strategists out there, and plenty of technology consultants. It believes it is unique at the intersection of the two. But it also knows that’s not enough. There’s plenty of research and analysis out there about best practices in digital business — but you don’t need to pay someone to tell you what others have said. The unique value it provides is that it has been there, and every engagement at dPrism is staffed by individuals with years if not decades of practical experience running digital businesses. You need to ask not just about the resumes of the partners selling you, but the people who will actually be delivering the work. At dPrism, consultants have experience ranging from fifteen years working in digital strategy to thirty years in the digital news business, from twenty-five years in senior operating roles to thirty years in digital media. It has run digital organizations — and so it knows exactly what you’re facing as you try to grow yours.

Growth Strategy

dPrism has been around long enough to know what works — and there are absolutely proven methodologies and processes to understand markets, find opportunities, and seize on innovation that it walks clients through. But those methods get uniquely applied to every organization, with a plan that is crafted for your particular needs, drawing on parallel experiences it has seen across industries and the specific challenges that you face. dPrism brings to the table not just a playbook, but a flexible sensibility and practical wisdom based on its experience running complex digital operations. If you can imagine another organization’s name being swapped into proposals that’s being presented to you, and then guess what? It wasn’t written for you, and it’s not going to meet your unique needs.

It’s so easy to come in and tell someone how antiquated their infrastructure is, and how they need a whole set of new systems. But that should be the last step, not the first. Change isn’t about technology; it’s about culture and about maximizing the skills and talents of your people. Change is about new perspectives and understanding that a digital organization is digital from beginning to end, from idea generation to implementation. That’s what dPrism spends a lot of time working with clients on: how to not just get the right systems in place but to build the culture around those new systems so that the mission succeeds and doesn’t just fall flat in the execution. dPrism doesn’t run away once it has sold you new technology; it works with you to ensure its success.

Bringing digital growth right to the bottom line

Digital Prism Advisors has been serving clients worldwide since 2014. It partners with forward-thinking organizations to empower positive change through technology-led improvements. Its engagements have helped transform leading B2B companies in several industry sectors from manufacturing, publishing and legal to large membership associations. dPrism’s core set of management consulting services encompass three key areas – technology, product management and business transformation. While each client engagement requires a unique and special blend of solutions based on their goals and challenges, clients also benefit from its use of proven frameworks that make implementing the recommendations more straightforward and actionable. At the end of the day, the goal is making it easier to capitalize on opportunities and accelerate growth.

dPrism delivers growth through digital acceleration. It works with clients to imagine their future, define their potential markets, identify compelling value and validate with real-time market feedback. Whether your actual product is a virtual or physical good or service, almost every business needs to employ digital capabilities to attract, sell to, serve and support their customer base. dPrism helps clients understand their capabilities, identify potential gaps and build a framework to allow for successful development of new digital products and services.

Digital product strategy
User needs analysis/customer feedback and insight
Technology capabilities
Product roadmap (run, grow, transform)
Digital product governance
Cross-functional analysis with focus on products and services, tooling, processes and culture

Experienced digital executives

Even the best digital strategy and capability analysis can fail without the right execution plan. dPrism has both the experience and the expertise to guide its clients through the implementation planning process to ensure that products and services are created on time and on budget. Coming out of execution planning dPrism helps its clients govern the implementation process, working in close collaboration with both internal and external development teams, and bringing in top level developers to do the work directly, depending on its clients’ needs. Putting customer insights into action is one of the most challenging steps for product leaders. Customer conversations are valuable, but they rarely get turned into actual product roadmaps. It is time-consuming and challenging to do it right, but there is nothing more important than taking the time to listen to your customers and improving your offerings as a result.

If you aren’t yet talking to your customers regularly, what is stopping you? It doesn’t have to be a rigid or polished process. And there are lots of great templates out there for questions you can ask. If you have every rated your likelihood of recommending a product on a scale of 0-10 you have answered a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. NPS can help you get a quick read on how customers like your product, but it’s very simplistic and is not always the measure that will most tie to customer satisfaction, retention, and value. dPrism recommends using NPS as one measure of customer satisfaction, but not as a sole metric of customer insights. To drive revenue from customer insights, you need something much more – and it’s not a particular tool. It’s an approach.

Meet the leader behind the success of dPrism

Adriaan Bouten is dPrism’s CEO and Founder, responsible for helping mid-sized enterprise organizations identify and execute digital growth opportunities through cohesive strategy, effective technology and digital transformations. Adriaan has 25 years of experience in digital transformation and is passionate about advising executives to unlock the hidden potential of their organization in today’s digital ecosystem. Before founding dPrism in 2014, Adriaan was SVP & Chief Digital Officer at S&P Global (formerly McGraw-Hill Financial); where he led the digital transformation, lean six sigma, and technology efforts for a $1B division of the $5B global information organization. He also developed and executed digital transformation strategies for multiple businesses enabling revenue growth, innovation and product development, time-to-market improvements and operating cost reductions. Adriaan is currently a limited partner of MissionOG, private equity and venture capital firm and Social Starts, a venture capital partnership, and has previously served as a board member and chair of the technology committee at Digital Content Next, a non-profit online publishing association. Adriaan holds an MS in Accounting from Georgetown University. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with family, traveling, sailing and reading.