Today, digital transformation is essential to business success, with research showing that digital leaders grow their customer base by 0.5% and revenues by 0.8% each year, while late adopters experience zero growth in their active customer base and a decline of 1.4% per year on revenues.
On average, organisations with advanced digital transformation maturity create better customer experiences, generate higher productivity, increase innovation and the ability to make key decisions based on data-led insights.
Yet while 87% of organisations believe that digital technologies will disrupt their industry, only 44% feel adequately prepared to manage those disruptions. So how does a business successfully navigate the journey toward digital transformation maturity?
Stage 1: Build the foundation
There are four key stages on the path to digital transformation maturity, the first being the initiation stage. This is the time to establish your digital infrastructure and take stock of your digital maturity. What do we mean by this?
Digital maturity is a measure of how well-placed your organisation is to use technology to positively influence growth, and this includes the skills, mindset and attitudes – aka ‘culture’ – of your leadership team and broader workforce.
It goes beyond how you invest in new technologies; digital maturity also measures the degree to which your organisation uses data-led insights to drive decision-making and whether you use technology to enhance your end-customer experience.
During the initiation stage, the Digital Maturity Model (DMM) can be used to gauge where your organisation sits on the maturity curve and considers the following six organisational pillars:
- Customer
- Strategy
- Technology
- Operations
- Culture, people & organisation
- Data
You can use the DMM to uncover your pain points, identify areas of focus and determine the investment priorities – the basic digital tools and processes to establish your key infrastructure. It is at this stage that you set the roadmap for your digital transformation journey.
Stage 2: Explore new technologies and processes
In stage two, you begin to engage your organisation in your digital transformation, connecting people, data and technology. This is the stage where you adopt and experiment with more advanced technologies and digital processes to elevate performance. This marks an important step in your digital transformation maturity. When executed correctly, the new technology and/or processes are used to their fullest potential and your people begin to see and understand the benefits.
During the exploration, you should embrace innovation and encourage people to challenge current ways of doing things and test out new digital solutions to improve collaboration, efficiency and outcomes for both your people and your, customers.
Take employee experience (EX) technology, which elevates employee engagement through intuitive employee portals, gamified training modules, internal communication platforms and real-time feedback mechanisms. EX technology can streamline internal processes and create an environment where employees feel valued and motivated to work.
Stage 3: Digital optimisation
Stage three is when digital tools and processes are weaved into every aspect of your operations. So rather than simply using technology, your organisation actually becomes technology-driven. During Integration, you can optimise your operations and agility through the data you capture about processes and products, in turn bringing you closer to your people and your customers. This is when data-driven decision-making comes into play – rather than relying on leadership expertise alone, key decisions can be made based on data analysis and trends.
This allows you to uncover critical insights about your operations and customers so that you can improve customer experience or even uncover new, lucrative opportunities. All industries can use data to streamline and grow their operations – from improving patient diagnosis and treatment in health, to predicting weather patterns for agriculture.
Stage 4: Get set to transform
At the peak of your digital transformation maturity, you are ready to re-think business models and leverage technology to create new value propositions and continue to grow your organisation.
At the fourth and final stage, you should be ready to become an adaptive organisation that can respond to change with speed and confidence. Through the use of fully-integrated Artificial Intelligence, automation and cloud-based document solutions for example, you can create seamless workflows and make fast, customer-centric decisions.
This all-important transformation stage sets up your organisation so you can stay ahead of the competition, drive better outcomes for employees and customers and be ready to adapt to whatever may come next.
Start your journey
Digital transformation is not just about implementing more and better technologies, but aligning culture, people, structure and tasks. And while it requires investment and evolving the way your organisation operates, the opportunities for digital transformation are boundless.
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