A Digital Maturity Model is a way to score your organization’s digital maturity across multiple dimensions and categories.
It’s a tool which helps guide your organization’s digital transformation by creating a clear baseline and a shared perspective on where your organization needs to build capability.
Completing one helps you understand where you are today, versus where you want to be tomorrow, and allows the company to be on the same page about what good looks like, and how to get there.
This article includes:
- A Digital Maturity Model: dimensions grouped by category where you can score your organization’s digital maturity from (1) limited to (5) best in class,
- A Digital Maturity Evaluation Summary: an output which shows your score overall, by category and makes strengths and weaknesses easy to visualize
- A Digital Maturity Development Canvas: a goal setter and project tracker for you to set AI maturity goals, actions and responsibilities
- An implementation guide: how to use and adapt the model within your organizational context
Starting a digital transformation by benchmarking your current Digital Maturity status helps:
- Baseline: scores where you are today and where you have strengths and weaknesses
- Understand what good looks like: create clear understanding of what best in class looks like versus your current position
- Pick priority areas: helps you decide which dimensions to build capability in to achieve your digital transformation goals
- Create a roadmap: using the maturity development canvas you can state maturity goals, what you will do to get there, and by when
- Create a clear, shared language: common understanding within the organization of goals and where you want to go
A digital transformation is iterative: a process of rewiring an organization from analogue first ways of working and product development.
A digital maturity model is a critical supporting tool to ensure everyone is on the same page, and working towards the same goals.
Our model is designed to help you determine which dimensions are key to your digital transformation strategy, and support your development towards them.
It’s not important to score best in class across every dimension, merely those which support your digital goals.
In this article we’ll share how to use a Digital Maturity Model within your organization, including adapting it to your organizational context, how to complete the evaluation and how to treat it as a living document.
We provide a full Digital Maturity Model, Digital Maturity Assessment scorecard, and a development canvas.
The Hustle Badger Digital Maturity Model
What is a Digital Maturity Model
A Digital Maturity Model is a practical tool that helps an organization achieve digital transformation goals by assessing current capability and building a roadmap towards desired maturity level.
It does this by assessing an organization’s digital capabilities and mindset across multiple categories, and dimensions, and scoring them from low to high, based on the behaviors or competencies exhibited.
Digital Transformation Guide with Real Transformation Examples
The output is visualized as a spider diagram to help identify strengths and weaknesses at a glance.
It is then supported with a development canvas, which allows you to identify what level of achievement you wish to achieve per dimension, the actions that will be taken, who is responsible for implementation and by when it will be achieved.
We’ve organized our model into 6 categories:
- Culture: digital mindset, innovation capability, and methods of communication and collaboration
- People: whether the organization is organized for digital success, and whether digital skills and competencies exist in house
- Leadership: leadership from the top, their embrace of digital behaviors, and their focus on digital when it comes to key strategy and budget decisions
- Product: digital product development focus and capability, engagement with emerging technologies, processes and project management, product operating model and discovery techniques
- Technology: investment in and management of the organization’s tech stack and interoperability
- Enablement: how digital is enabled via investments in data and systems and security
Within those 6 categories are 15 different dimensions to score.
Each dimension is further divided into 5 levels from Limited (1) to Best in Class (5), where specific behaviors and attributes at those levels are described, using skills and competency based language.
At its simplest the model therefore is a big grid of categories, dimensions and attributes at each level, along with a scoring column:
A digital maturity model is intended to be iterative:
- Baseline: benchmark current capabilities against benchmarks
- Assessment: evaluate strengths and weaknesses and how they align to company goals
- Identify priority areas: aligned with strategic focus areas, and to proactively manage risk associated with digitization
- Use development canvas as a roadmap to maturity: set desired maturity levels, detail actions to get there, appoint an accountable person and set a deadline
- Rescore: assess success, current status and either retire or set new goals
Why use a Digital maturity model?
A digital maturity model creates clarity around skill and capability gaps, and provides the organization with a shared understanding of what digital-first behaviors and competencies look like across roles.
It helps make digital transformation goals concrete, and supports risk mitigation and strategy planning to develop digital first capabilities.
It maps where investment could be allocated across functions, infrastructure, enablement and tooling.
In transformation scenarios where an organization is rewiring mindsets, processes and offerings, having clarity around where you are today, vs where you want to be tomorrow, plus what that looks like, is a critical unlock for teams looking to evolve.
The benefits include:
- Clarity: what good looks like across multiple dimensions
- Shared language: allowing everyone in the organization to discuss digital maturity in the same terms, with the same reference document
- Gap analysis: identifying where you’re strong, where you’re weak, and what’s missing
- Risk management: understanding where gaps might result in initiative failure or regulatory risk, and being able to mitigate
- Informed digital planning: knowing where you can move forwards today with digital goals, versus where you have to build capability in order to execute tomorrow
- Business case for needs: making it clear where investment is necessary and uncovering areas where teams are obstructed from moving forwards
- Capability mapping, hiring and upskilling plan: allows you identify areas where you need to hire new profiles
- Foundations: protocols, governance and infrastructure required to run a successful digital-first operation
The model can help you avoid risks to digital transformation plans, such as:
- Foreseeable issues with change management: rewiring an organization is complex, and requires clarity about the why and the goals, which a digital maturity assessment can provide
- Lack of clarity: understanding what good looks like can be a powerful unlock in helping your organization understand where and how they must improve
- Failure to identify risks and gaps: a digital maturity model demystifies known unknowns, and ensures gaps and risks are identified and can be mitigated or prevented
- Silo’ed or fragmented planning cycles: due to lack of a shared baseline and source of truth, digital initiatives might be pursued in isolation or patchily across the organization
- Investment misallocation: failure to invest appropriately in some areas while overinvesting in others
- Failure to build or manage necessary infrastructure: lack of capability in-house resulting in critical platforms or tooling not being developed
Our Digital Maturity Assessment is part of a suite of management tools which can meaningfully improve how you set strategies, manage teams and fill capability gaps:
Limitations and downsides
As with any other tool or template, the value of this Digital Maturity Model is dependent on the degree to which you invest in the process, and your unique organizational context.
The limitations and costs associated with rolling out a Digital Maturity Assessment include:
- Committing for a defined period: a digital maturity model is the first stage in a digital transformation process which may span multiple years
- Communication load: as with any major transformation effort, it’s key to communicate the why, the what, the how and to do so consistently
- Change management: making major changes within an organization creates a domino effect with implications for hiring, structure, skills programs and more
- Honoring the results: committing to the negatives as well as the positives of the scorecard can be difficult
- Investment implications: the output of the model is likely to require budget and time investments in order to develop priority areas
- Iteration and adaptation: as time goes on you may want to adapt the model to your evolving context, while routine rescoring and goal setting is necessary to stay on track
It’s important to be clear on these points before embarking on the journey.
When it makes sense to use a Digital Maturity Model
A digital maturity model is designed as step one of a digital transformation process, and designed to be used to shape transformation goals, strategy and outline weaknesses and risks. It’s best used in conjunction with a digital transformation ambition and program.
In order to ensure you’re set up for success, the optimal conditions are when:
- Core strategic focus: when digital transformation is more than an aspiration, it’s a critical strategic goal
- Leadership are aligned: the C-suite understand the tool and are onboard with implementation
- People are involved: HR are aware and on hand to support people leaders throughout the company adapt, communicate and score the model
- Developing a roadmap towards maturity: the company is looking to baseline current status and set maturity priorities and goals
- Embedding a shared culture is a priority: when you’re looking to set the same understanding and use the same language across all functions and levels of the hierarchy
