By Professor Bernadette A. Minton
Academic Director and Interim Executive Director, The Risk Institute
Arthur E. Shepard Endowed Professor in Insurance
Professor of Finance
The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business

It’s almost 2016 (or it is already, depending on when you’re reading this). Everything is digital, and so you took the plunge and developed a mobile app for your customers. The launch of your new mobile app was supposed to streamline and enhance the customer experience, but since it was released it seems as if your customers and your employees rue the day the app appeared. Is it possible that this app has actually been detrimental to your business? Have you found yourself thinking, why haven’t my customers and my employees embraced this new technology?

From Apple to Zillow, digital disruption – the impact of new technologies on the existing consumer brand experience – challenges consumer business. The first thought that comes to mind is that digital disruptions continue to raise consumer expectations about the brand and their online and in-store experiences.

Yet, there is another side. One that is not often considered, but equally important: the digital expectations of the company’s employees. The employees who are charged with innovating the brand and enhancing customers’ brand experiences are also savvy digital users themselves with their own increasingly elevated digital expectations. Senior executives need to consider how digital disruptions also are influencing and modifying their employees’ behaviors and expectations.

At our upcoming Risk Series, Digital Disruption: Brand, Strategy and Technology, taking place on January 21, 2016, our session leaders Deborah Mitchell, Clinical Professor of Marketing, with The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business, and Keith Strier, Principal, with EY Advisory Strategy and Practice and Founder of IDEAS (Innovation, Digital Enterprise & Agile Strategy) collaborate to discuss applications of current research on consumer behavior to digital engagement with customers and employees to understand your organization’s digital vulnerabilities and opportunities.

I invite you to join us and other executives in this interactive session as we engage in conversations about the leading strategies to understand customers’ and employees’ digital experiences as well as discuss the current challenges firms face in today’s digital environment. You will gain insights into how you can develop an enterprisewide digital strategy aligned with your firm’s corporate strategy and brand vision. You will also be in the position of leveraging, and not just mitigating, digital disruptions with your employees and with your customers.

The Risk Institute Executive Education Series will continue on January 21, 2016 with Digital Disruption: Brand, Strategy and Technology, a half-day course for executives. For more information, or to sign up for the session, visit FISHER.OSU.EDU/RISK