Gauging Digital Maturity

There has been an increasing advancement in enriching businesses through Digital transformation across all industries in the recent past. While businesses continue to gather momentum in this path, there is a growing need to understand a competitive measure of where they stand. The success of every strategy is relative; sometimes it is relative to what/where we were yesterday to what/where we are today and sometimes it is relative to competitors. Digital transformation strategy also has to consider some milestones if the business wants to consider the success/failure of the same. It is also important to gauge the progress of this transformation while it is underway to ensure that the future relies on this foundation. A Digital Maturity Model should help businesses address these concerns of and certify that they stay successful over their digital transformation journey. This blog tries to address when businesses should concentrate the relativity aspect (as discussed earlier) along with what should constitute a Digital Maturity Model.

The theory of relativity in this transformation aspect springs up from the decision of management to address the customer expectation evolution or the competition evolution. If the competitors have evolved a digital offering, the business may succumb to the pressure and follow the competitor or concentrate on innovative ways to focus on differentiation as a long term strategy. If the customers are pampered by competitors through digital offerings then the businesses have to address their offerings by enriching their provisions in the past. The seed of demand of a better supply often doesn’t start with end customers. It is the businesses in the same space that try to focus on differentiation who bring such demand. As and when competitors follow the differentiator and try to generate similar service offerings to customers this demand which started as a seed becomes a bare minimum standard. Some businesses just like processes are broken, if you don’t second it, at least Seth Godin thinks so. These bridges to these broken processes are also demands from customers that businesses address as they evolve.

Coming back to when businesses should consider relativity against themselves and competitors and a maturity model. Every business should always look at where they stand when adopting Digital strategy. They should answer whether it should be a bottom up or a top down strategy. Regardless of whether it is bottom up or top driven it should always be driven and backed up by senior management. The necessities of long term aspects of transformation through cost sensitive elements like Big Data, analytics, IOT and so on need to be addressed across all verticals of the organization. There are low hanging fruits and process enhancements that can be pursued through short term strategies by adopting workflow tools or robotics. The elements that constitute the internal assessment of digital transformation and maturity are Digital DNA, Service Models, Product Portfolio, Cash flow and Market Share. I will dig deeper into each of these aspects in a follow up blog.

The success of internal digital transformation should be gauged through NPS scores, customer support efficiency, process efficiency improvements, customer satisfaction and the propensity towards the differentiation path. As businesses achieve significant improvements in the foresaid areas from yesteryears performance they are geared to look at the competitors’ progress in similar areas. The internal assessment will enable businesses understand the success of the foundations laid from the digital transformation journey. When the businesses advance to the comparison of competitors’ performance on digital journey, they should gauge customer perception of digital capabilities of themselves against competition. The value a business offers to the customer is often measured against customer perception, and digital transformation success is no different.

When businesses compare their digital maturity against competitors, they should consider the aspects such as Integrated Data/technology models, Contextual Content effectiveness, Service models, Customer engagement, Channel effectiveness and Organizations strategy. I will dig deeper into these aspects in a follow up blog.