Analyse your Digital Maturity and Drive Growth
Before you decide to leverage growth, it is mandatory to evaluate your current position. For a business, evaluating digital maturity is the first step towards driving business growth and digital transformation using digital technologies. If you build up a strategy and put a plan in action without understanding your current stage, you may end up making high-cost and low-value decisions.
Digital Maturity – Introduction
“Digital maturity is the ability to quickly respond to or take advantage of opportunities in the market based on current tech stacks, staffing resources, and digital technology. It’s an organization’s ability to take on digital transformation not only from the standpoint of digital technology, but organization-wide, including people, culture, and processes, to achieve business outcomes.”
— Dave Rutkowski, CEO, Performance Improvement Partners
Basically, it is a measure of an organization’s ability to create value through digital technologies and is a key predictor of success for organizations on the road to digital transformation. Though this may seem highly emphasized on technology, the level of digital maturity of an organization is also impacted by the adaptability and speed of the company, mainly due to the human capital and the processes.
Digital maturity considers organizational health, including:
- Digital literacy across its workforce
- IT resources
- Culture
- Demographics
- Organizational structure
- Compliance and regulation
- Technology and software stack
- Employee learning and development initiatives
Digital Maturity – Importance
Due to the adoption of digital advancements, and work-from-home scenarios with the COVID-19 pandemic, digital transformation is expected sooner than ever, in all industries. The pandemic highlighted the importance of digital innovation for organizations to be ready for future challenges. This also resulted in the implementation of digital technologies at a faster pace.
According to a report by Celerity ,63% of leaders state that they embraced digital transformation sooner than originally planned due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mckinsey – 85% of executives said their businesses have somewhat or greatly accelerated the implementation of technologies that digitally enable employee interaction and collaboration since the start of COVID-19—weeks instead of typical months or years.
Darmstadt, Germany –Software AG report says 97% of global IT directors said their companies went through a digital transformation due to COVID with 60% of them stating the transformation was a “large amount of change.”
McKinsey’s research shows that the best-performing 10% of digitized enterprises earn as much as 80% of their industries’ digital revenues
A recent Deloitte survey reveals the correlation between a company’s digital maturity and its financial performance following a digital transformation project. The study uses ‘seven digital pivots’ to determine an organization’s progress toward digital maturity. The pivots include:
- A flexible and secure infrastructure
- Data mastery
- Digitally savvy and open talent networks
- Ecosystem engagement
- Intelligent workflows
- Unified customer experience
- Business model adaptability
Having high digital maturity helps organizations accelerate the digital transformation process by enabling them to adapt better and faster and helping them with a competitive advantage. Compared to the organizations with less digital maturity, the ones who stood higher on the digital maturity curve were more likely to exceed their industry average on crucial financial metrics.
Deloitte reports 43% of highly digital mature companies to see significantly higher net profits than their industry averages.
Digital Maturity – The Impact on Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is basically the process of physically changing workflows through digital technologies. Hence your digital maturity is the degree to which you understand and can implement the changes in the organization. To know everything about Digital Transformation, read more.
Digital maturity is just the characteristic of your organization v/s the actions you are planning for the digital transformation. Both these are interrelated and have implications for business operations as well as the efficiency of the processes.
As mentioned earlier, moving forward with digital transformation without knowing the digital maturity level can result in a high risk of low-value decisions and can derail the operations. But it can also impact alternatively, developing a digital maturity model without the right insights can make it harder to assess the areas that play a vital role in driving the transformation.
In the digital age, the value of digital transformation and resulting business opportunities will continue to evolve.
Hence, digital maturity is now important more than ever.
Digital Maturity – How to Measure?
Discovery is the first step in any journey; hence it is the first step in the digital transformation journey as well. At this stage, organizations lay down the foundation of your digital transformation journey. Measure your digital maturity with the help of a few questions in the discovery phase that will help you as you progress on your digital transformation journey and the question of how to measure digital maturity:
- Do we have a clear strategic direction, vision, and objectives?
- Where are we in our digital discovery journey?
- Do we have buy-ins across the organization?
- What disruptive forces drive the digital transformation in our organization, e.g. market competition, customer demands, & technology disruption.
- What emerging trends do we see emerging that will impact us as a firm?
- Compared to the market, are we among the leaders, laggards, or mediocre?
- How consistent is our digital experience across different channels?
- How are we going to transform digitally?
- How shall we measure the success of our initiatives?
Digital Maturity – The Models
A Digital Maturity Model (DMM) is a framework that is used to assess and understand the current level of digital maturity of an organization. The model offers a roadmap to reach digital maturity goals, plan for growth, and measure success. Fortunately, there are numerous DMMs available to choose from, providing you with data-driven insight around the current levels of digital maturity.
A model might help you with insights around sales and marketing, another may offer data focused on service management, and yet another around IT services. One of the most popular digital maturity models was produced by the partnership of Google and the Boston Consulting Group. This Digital Maturity Model (DMM) mainly focuses on data and how central it is to achieving digital maturity.
Digital Maturity Model Types
Overall, all the Digital Maturity Models fall into three categories:
1. Generic
This model flows through a continuum of maturity (emotional, digital, etc.). Much like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you can apply it to anything.
2. Detailed, industry-agnostic
This offers a solution more refined than the generic model, yet agnostic enough to be applied still to any industry. It looks at digital maturity across multiple aspects of the business, including strategy, operations, people, and processes.
3. Industry-specific
A more specific model of digital maturity, this model is based on an individual industry with unique models or frameworks to support it.
Whichever model your organization chooses, it is important for the teams to collaborate in bringing the business challenges together and working through solutions and processes.
Digital Maturity – The Four Stages
Digital transformation is a journey, and the path your company takes on that journey depends on your company’s goals and definition of digital maturity. You need a common understanding of where you’ve been and where you plan to go.
Within each digital maturity model, there are multiple stages that act as a framework to guide goals and evaluate success. And, when utilizing a generic digital maturity model, one can compare the stages of digital maturity to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
In the same way that self-actualization cannot be met without basic, psychological, and self-fulfilment needs being met, an optimal state of digital maturity – which maximizes value-creation and profitability — requires a firm foundation. Justin Grossman, CEO of Meltmedia, defines the four levels of digital maturity as follows:
1. Incidental: The need for a strong foundation
Activities supporting digital maturity are done by happenstance and are not planned or strategic in nature.
2. Intentional: Building a digital strategy
There is purpose and strategy behind digital transformation activities but only in some, not all, areas of business. Many times, these processes are not yet automated.
3. Integrated: Streamlined digital transformation efforts supported by leadership
Companies operating at this level are successfully integrating digital transformation strategies across multiple areas of business in a streamlined fashion with buy-in from leadership.
4. Optimized: The peak of digital maturity
The cream of the crop, these companies are fully integrated into digital transformation making it a part of company culture. They can turn on a dime when the market shifts.
About Cygnet.one
Established in 2000, Cygnet.One works with clients across 35 countries and has a strong team of over 1000 employees. Cygnet Infotech’s offerings range from IT Services, Technology Products, and Tax Technology solutions. Aligned with its vision of providing technology-enabled business solutions, Cygnet Infotech delivers end-to-end solutions for clients’ most pressing business needs. Cygnet Infotech’s Technology Services enable clients to accelerate growth and optimize business operations through, Product Engineering, Bespoke Solutions, IT Modernization, Automation, Implementation Services, Risk Mitigation Services, Information Security & Compliance Services, and IT Staff Augmentation.
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Cygnet.One
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Cygnet.One is a technology consulting and development company, that co-creates business growth strategies and delivers partnership value through the Power of Digital. We specialize in leading technologies such as Cloud Computing, AI/ML, and Blockchain with a focus on innovation and agility.
