5 Keys to Upgrade Your Organization’s Digital Maturity

Digital Maturity is about embracing new digital strategies so that companies can accomplish their business's vision and goals. In other words, it refers to their ability to adapt and respond to the ever-evolving technological trends. And to stay afloat in the market, it's important for companies to grow their digital maturity from time to time and bring. In addition, it calls for the need to constantly reassess their digital toolset and adopt new strategies, processes, and digital technologies when needed.

With new technologies coming into the market consistently organizations have started to focus on digital transformations of their digital businesses. McKinsey Global Institute’s September 2020 report states that more than 85% of company executives reported a significant need for automation and digitization of the business processes to cope with the challenges of the pandemic.

Importance of digital maturity  

Digitally mature businesses have more growth potential, which helps them achieve more success with less effort in a short period. Plus, they also benefit from better employee engagement, higher efficiency, and increased customer satisfaction. Digital maturity helps companies achieve all this and so much more because it involves the use of improved digital technologies. In addition, companies can elevate their success graph quickly and easily while attaining a competitive edge. Therefore, digital maturity is crucial to surviving in the digital marketplace. 

A practical methodology to achieve data maturity and drive digital transformation.  

1. Collect data to review your existing digital capabilities.  

   Before beginning the transformation journey, make sure you are clear about your goals and vision. Determine what kind of transformation you need? Define your company's perception? Consider customers' expectations and perspectives, your company's current working model, and what kind of customer experiences you aim to deliver.  

   You can't achieve Data Maturity without data analysis of your company's digital performance. Collect unstructured and structured high-end data about the production, customers, distribution, manufacturing, processes, and competitors. Projects involving digital transformation require proper data analytics. In addition, you may leverage artificial intelligence tools for the same.  

   Identify the gaps in the existing infrastructure and review the digital capabilities of your digital business. Round off the different aspects of the existing infrastructure that needs to be transformed.  

2. Create a roadmap for digital transformation  

   Create a detailed roadmap for transforming the existing working processes of your business. Make sure to set your priorities right when creating the plan for guaranteed success every step of the way.  

   Consider the following points during the process: 

   • Creating value for the clients - Find out easy ways of digitally augmenting the core capabilities of your organization. Build plans for realigning them so that the outcomes meet customer expectations. Focus on using the existing digital assets for enhancing the deliveries that provide the most value to the customers. 
   • Combine the data collected by you with external data for creating out-of-the-box solutions for your customers' specific requirements. 
   • Focus on designing and delivering enhanced customer experiences through your products and services. The transformation should help enhance your business potential so that it's easy to adapt to customers' ever-changing demands and expectations. Embrace advanced technologies such as cloud, APIs, and mobile for strengthening the business's working system both externally and internally. 

   Remember, transformation is only possible when every aspect of the business is seamlessly aligned, including the processes, teams, and smart interaction tools used for bridging the gap between employees and customers.  

   Creating an actionable and clear roadmap digital maturity of your business will allow you to easily organize transformation projects and initiatives. Besides, it helps outline a progressive plan and the digital architecture needed for growth and success. The roadmap also reduces the costs and risk factors involved in the proposed initiatives. And on top of that, it facilitates businesses with the flexibility of leveraging the latest technology for new business goals. 

3. Build digital maturity strategies for long-term and short-term goals 

   Companies aim to attain higher digital capabilities through digital maturity. Focus on facilitating your customers with top-notch digital experiences. Your business strategies should help you in achieving both short-term and long-term goals. Digitally mature companies consistently use digital tools to boost productivity and optimize work processes while improving their profitability. 

   Your long-term digital maturity strategies should be focused on bringing all the departments into a single platform. It will allow you to access your company's performance easily. For the short-term strategies, research and find the software fitting your organization's business context. Once everything is aligned, you use a digital solution for promoting the efficiency of your team and employees, which leads to higher productivity.  

4. Start with small digital initiatives.  

   Small initiatives or digital projects are focused on enterprise-level initiatives. These initiatives help determine what works for a particular initiative and what doesn't. For example -  

   You plan to add chatbots to your product's website so that visitors can easily navigate to the product offerings. It's best to implement chatbots on limited product pages and not on the entire site. Now, carefully monitor prospects' interaction with the chatbots and pay attention to what experiences they had. Using this data, you can update the responses of chatbots and build improved strategies for meeting customer needs efficiently.  

5. Measure the impact of digital transformation 

   One of the most important aspects is to ensure that you are on the right path to achieving data maturity. Use the metrics to measure and assess the success rate of the efforts employed to drive transformation. It will also allow you to determine whether or not a digital transformation strategy is helping you to meet your business goals.  

   Plus, you can also track the progress of the transformation. However, you need to be very careful at this step. Measure the use of digital assets leveraged for the purpose. It will give you a better understanding of the effectiveness of new strategies and tools. You may bring necessary changes to your plans accordingly.  

Endnote  

Driving digital transformation and achieving Data Maturity means rebooting the organization's operating model. It requires a clear digital vision for the company and its employees and a digital culture where digital innovation, experimentation, and agility are prioritized. In addition, it also requires a strong mechanism for privacy and data security of customers to safeguard their trust in the company.  

Digital maturity isn't the destination but a journey. So, focus your actions on the different milestones of this journey to attain the desired level of business growth and success.