Podcast transcription

Introduction

For all of you who are embarked on a digital transformation journey, how do you know you are on the right track? Are your digital investments upping your enterprise’s overall digital maturity? How can we assess an organization’s digital maturity?

Hello everyone to another episode of DigiBizCentral podcast on organizational excellence. I am your host Wasim R. In today’s episode, we will attempt to answer these questions. But first, a note about this specific podcast.

The DigiBizCentral podcast on organizational excellence is focused on covering various aspects of today’s digital business particularly on business strategies as well as management methods and practices that drive organizational excellence. We encourage you to subscribe to this podcast to ensure that you are always getting notified on future episodes as they are published. Also, please take a moment to rate us on iTunes or whatever channel you get this delivered on. We highly appreciate your feedback.

In today’s episode, I will introduce a digital maturity framework, which organizations can use to assess their digital transformation maturity more holistically. The underlying idea behind this framework is that as an organization continues its digital transformation journey, it must pay attention to certain elements to ensure that they are addressed in their digital projects and initiatives. Defining a digital transformation roadmap with specific milestones and outcomes along the way can ease the transition and increase the chances of success. Before we get started, please note that I will cover this topic in two parts or episodes. As this is part 1, look for part 2 to be published immediately after this one.

So, let’s get started with Part 1 of this topic.

The world in general and organizations specifically have been going through a digital transformation for a number of years now. Digital transformation does not refer to one or two programs that an organization embarks upon at some point in time. Rather, over the years, most organizations have taken on various digital initiatives triggered by their business imperatives and since then have continued their journey, which continues until today and would for some time to come. Depending on when each organization started, they are at different stages of that journey.

But all this then raises the question that how does an organization know where is it in that journey of transformation and where’s it heading? Specifically, how can an organization know that it’s progressing and maturing as it goes through that journey? For example, does an organization that migrates its business applications to the cloud can be regarded as digitally mature? What about the one that actively uses social media to interact with its customers or the one that has established a blockchain system to manage its transactions?

The answer to that question is that unless those steps have helped your organization become more customer centric or improve on your operational excellence then the answer is no. The market doesn’t reward organizations for moving to the cloud, for example, unless those steps have helped your organization to come closer to your customers and made your organization more agile and nimble to respond to market needs.

The move to digital, therefore, must be more holistic in nature. In this fast paced economy, it’s important to ensure that rather than merely taking on a few digital products and services, an organization becomes digitally mature so it’s firing on all engines for it to be more effective. Band-aid digital solutions in this economy simply don’t work. We saw how GE, despite its numerous digital innovations, suffered serious setbacks due to not paying attention to its bloated internal operations and dropped out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index after being on it for more than a 100 years.