The efforts in digitisation have grown over the last few years, and the pandemic covid-19 has accelerated the march.
In these digitisation and transformation processes, organisations must know how they position themselves and how they can align their strategy with industry and market trends. This is called digital maturity and analyses an organisation capabilities and results in the face of digital transformation challenges.
To run a business with future, it is not enough to have the technologies and expect them to do the rest for us. Technologies are, indeed, the basis of the future, but to get there organisations must be willing to keep up with the evolutionary route and change processes, mentalities and procedures to build a business with a stable base but adaptable to the requirements of a constantly changing market.
Digital transformation is a way to go to reach digital maturity.
When we talk about digital maturity, we are referring to the agility and flexibility of the organisation, the innovation that it is capable of generating and the focus on the consumer that digital transformation initiatives promote in the organisation. The more successes achieved, the more mature the organisation is.
Digital maturity is the degree of improvement an organisation achieves in operations and customer satisfaction thanks to process automation. In an ideal scenario, automation is not an end or a business objective, but rather a support for business activity, a support that increases the efficiency and effectiveness of teams, processes and even technologies already exist.
Digital maturity largely depends on the development of technological tools that allow companies to automate processes and relationships with stakeholders while providing a global, integrated and real-time view of the business that is unfolding.
Digital maturity is a dynamic state: organisations can be more or less mature, can evolve to a better state or even revert to a worse one if they stop investing in digital transformation and let the market get ahead of them.
Digital culture is accelerating more than technological development accompanies, and this can be, in the long term, a break that prevents businesses from reaching full digital maturity. However, is not enough to take a business to the height of digital maturity: it needs, on the contrary, technological support that enables innovative business visions – and hence the need to evaluate, also and in parallel, the technological coefficient of these companies.
There are several forms and models of evaluation. But evaluating the level of digital maturity is essential during the first phase of digital transformation in an organisation, because it allows to know how the company is positioned, what its strengths are, and to better define the strategy and the first steps to follow.
Today, digital maturity is more important than ever, and it has become one of the main competitive advantages, as the most digitally mature organisations quickly adapted to the new conditions imposed by the pandemic and were able to maintain their operations and their full potential. In highly competitive markets, any organisation that fails to adapt to changing consumer demands is jeopardising its survival.
We've all heard about the advantages of digital transformation – but the concept of digital maturity still tends to stray from business exploration.
A digitally mature company is a company that is ahead of the market, and we are not just talking about financial results. In a company with a good level of digital maturity, this work is the construction of a digital culture, agile and adaptable processes, and strong and solid relationships with stakeholders – all supported by a technological structure as invisible as it is efficient. In a digitally mature company, the customer ends each interaction fully satisfied; partners and suppliers do not complain about bureaucratic labyrinths; employees do not regret repetitive tasks or whose value is not immediately perceptible. In a company with digital maturity, everything works even if the pieces are not on display – and that's what makes it stand out among the others.
In short, digitally mature companies use digitisation initiatives as tools for growth, cost optimisation and revenue growth. Hence, the need to promote the organisation's digital maturity to ensure business success.