Many online merchants start with a small website built on a WSYWIG (what you see is what you get) platform, like Wix. It’s an easy drag-and-drop platform to showcase your small product catalog, provide product details, and use third-party payment processors. It’s easy to set up and get started showcasing your brand and products. Still, as you grow, this platform isn’t built to handle large amounts of data. It cannot customize and integrate third-party solutions for financials, taxes, shipping, and customer management. This lack of flexibility creates the need for multiple systems to manage individual processes. In the beginning, using separate technology for a few internal processes can work, but it won’t work forever.
When your brand and online ecommerce business outgrows your current platform, it’s time to make a change. It’s critical to any online business’ success that you can leverage existing technology for your business and be prepared for new technologies to meet your customers' needs. This is called Digital Maturity.
Digital maturity is the ability to take advantage of opportunities with new technology development. You can predict digital transformation failures or successes using a digital maturity model for your business. Digital maturity doesn’t just focus on an organization's ability to implement new technology and software. It also focuses on people, culture, processes, and more to create a holistic approach to digitalization.
Digital maturity drives digital transformation because it measures your organization’s preparedness to understand and adapt to evolving customer demands as new technology is introduced. The higher the digital maturity level an organization has, the better the business results because you’re benefitting not only from new technology but also from past investments and increased digitization.
As an organization moves toward digital maturity, there are four main areas of success it sees within the organization:
Digital Maturity and Digital Transformation go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. Digital maturity measures your organization’s ability to understand and adapt to continuously changing customer demands created by the ever-changing technology landscape. Companies with a higher digital maturity level experience better results because they benefit from past technology investments and increased digitization. With the right tools in the right place, organizations provide superior offerings, processes, vision, and company culture.
There are many models to achieve digital maturity, but they all provide data-driven insight and evaluate your current levels of digital maturity. These models are the framework used to assess and understand your current level of digital maturity. It provides a roadmap to reach digital maturity goals, plan for growth, and measure success. For example, a company may use a digital maturity model around sales and marketing, whereas another may adopt a DMM around service management.
One of the most popular DMMs, Google identifies four stages that focus on marketing and sales:
In collaboration with TM Forum, Deloitte created the first pan-organizational digital model. This model covers five core business dimensions with 2 sub-dimensions and 179 criteria to assess digital maturity, track goal progress, and make impactful investments.
Deloitte’s five dimensions are:
The TM Forum added a sixth dimension to evaluate the organization's strategic and operational ability to use data and information assets to maximize business value.
To determine the levels of digital maturity, Deloitte surveyed several organizations to evaluate the degree to which they saw positive business impacts from their digitization strategy. Deloitte’s survey classifies organizations as higher-, medium-, or lower-maturity based on the degree of business benefits their digital efforts affected their success.
While high maturity is the goal of all businesses, most start at low to medium, and through the Deloitte DMM, follow a path to success and achieve high maturity.
The Digital Acceleration Index (DAI) is a diagnostic tool that allows you to assess your digital capabilities and compare digital performance with industry averages, peers, and best-in-class leaders. BCG’s DAI also assesses organizational readiness to become a bionic company, merging new technology with human capabilities that power growth, innovation, efficiency, and resilience. This assessment creates the digital maturity levels based on the DAI.
BCG’s digital maturity levels are:
DAI is leveraged in two ways:
Digital maturity impacts your operational efficiency and revenue. It’s essential to evaluate which stage you’re in and develop a digital transformation strategy to drive business growth and reduce money spent on technology. Knowing how to leverage digital adoption platforms drives your transformation and increases success. Kensium empowers organizations to become digitally proficient and future-proof their business for years to come. Contact us today and learn how today’s technology helps you well into the future.
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