The Digital Maturity Model: How Digitizing Information Helps You Achieve Your Goals

What is Digital Maturity

You’ve probably heard of the term “digital transformation,” but is digital transformation the same as digital maturity?

Yes and no.

Digital transformation is the process by which organizations endeavor to become digitally mature. However, digital maturity isn’t an endpoint, but a state of constant adaptation and flexibility.

Simply put, digital maturity is an organization’s ability to react to and make the most of technological innovations that affect the market.

Digital maturity is important because studies have shown that higher-maturity organizations are almost three times more likely to see above-average annual revenue growth and net profit margins than lower-maturity organizations.

Related: AIIM Best Practices — Incorporating Intelligent Capture in Your Digital Transformation Strategy

What is the Digital Maturity Model

Digital transformation is a reality for all organizations, but every organization is at a different point in their own transformation journey toward digital maturity. The guiding principle behind the Digital Maturity Model is that in order for organizations to know where they need to go, they must first understand where they’re currently at.

To that end, the Digital Maturity Model framework was designed to help organizations assess how digitally mature they are today in order to design a roadmap for future growth. The Digital Maturity Model’s high-level structure enables decision-makers to evaluate the status quo, identify opportunities for improvement, set benchmarks, and create and implement a plan for improvement.

Related: Transforming Business Workflows With Enterprise Information Capture

The Different Types of Digital Maturity Models

No single Digital Maturity Model exists. Numerous companies around the world have developed their own Digital Maturity Model frameworks, and the approach and focus of each varies.

What most Digital Maturity Model frameworks have in common is a set of dimensions that are relevant to digital engagement efforts and/or a set of stages of digital maturity.

For example, Deloitte and TM Forum’s Digital Maturity Model evaluates digital capability across five business dimensions: Customer, Strategy, Technology, Operations, and Organization & Culture. The Digital Maturity Model that Google and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) created, on the other hand, measures digital maturity across four stages of growth: Nascent, Emerging, Connected, and Multi-moment.

Digital Maturity Models often differ in regard to:

• Industry specialization: Some Digital Maturity Models focus on a specific industry to deliver a deeper understanding and better results.
• Scope: Scope varies from one Digital Maturity Model to the next. Sometimes, it makes sense for the model to take a holistic approach and assess an entire organization. Such big-picture reviews allow decision-makers to more easily identify areas for improvement. On the other hand, more specific focus areas allow for deeper analysis and are clearly a better approach when a single business area needs to be addressed.
• Assessment focus: Depending on the organization’s goals, a Digital Maturity Model may focus on products and services or on processes, people, and capabilities.

Related: Automating Information Management — It’s About Time

How to Measure Digital Maturity

For organizations that want to assess their digital maturity, the first step is to find the appropriate Digital Maturity Model.

Remember that models vary based on industry specialization, scope, and assessment focus, so consider what you want to get out of the assessment and what type of framework would best get you there. While some Digital Maturity Models are available for free online, paying for a more thorough assessment may be worthwhile if doing so will yield a better understanding of your organization’s current digital maturity.

Digital Maturity Through Smarter Information Flows

If your digital maturity results show much room for improvement, you’re not alone: Digital Maturity Models published by the International Data Corporation (IDC) show that 65% of organizations are either “digital explorers” or “digital players,” meaning that any digital transformation projects they have lack purpose or long-term strategy.

For many organizations, the issue is that they’re focusing on one-off attempts to create and archive digital resources rather than rearchitecting their business processes themselves. Experts agree that mastering the information flows inherent in all business processes is the key to digital transformation — and thus digital maturity.

For example, when organizations scan documents to a file or folder, they create digital resources that can be stored across various applications and document repositories. Scan to file solutions can be the first step to digital transformation by bringing documents into an existing workflow, converting them from paper into information that helps companies make timely decisions for their business and manage data more efficiently.

Scanning directly to a business process, on the other hand, turns documents into information that organizations can immediately put to use. This involves scanning documents as close to the point of information creation as possible, incorporating them directly into existing business workflows, and extracting data that will be important in downstream processes.

Organizations that are able to effectively automate paper workflows in this way will reap many benefits, including:

• 30% less time spent on document-intensive processes
• 30-40% fewer errors
• 25-30% increase in productivity

So where should you start? With an intelligent document capture solution and document scanners that allow you to accurately capture documents from anywhere and automatically connect that data to your business systems. And Kodak Alaris has just the tools for the job.

Contact Kodak Alaris today to learn about the best capture software and scanner options to help drive digital transformation and achieve greater digital maturity.