Figure 1.2 Digital strategy big picture
This digital strategy big picture serves as reference while you adopt a strategic topic, foster culture, generate impact, and implement digital capabilities. The template is available online.6
While the first rows, strategic topic and culture, should be fairly static, the impact and digital capabilities vary depending on your industry and your current level of digital maturity and organizational readiness.
Impact Venn
Your digital strategy will not generate impact if you don't foster culture or acquire digital capabilities, as illustrated in Figure 1.3. As you will probably not start on a greenfield, it is important to identify and fill the missing pieces to generate impact.
For example, an organization wants to create apps and automate processes faster and therefore sets up a low-code/no-code platform. However, the platform is seldom used because the organization lacks the maker culture. Once the employees are nurtured with workshops, hackathons, and casual training days, many employees gain new ideas and have an intrinsic motivation to pursue them. Soon after, the employees develop many apps (such as an HR chat bot and an employee dictionary) and automate some processes (such as analyzing and tagging incoming email attachments).
Figure 1.3 Impact Venn
Digital Maturity and Organizational Readiness
Acquiring more digital capabilities will increase the organization's level of digital maturity. Providing digital capabilities is just the first step into transforming into a digital business. Helping employees to adopt these new digital capabilities is crucial for any digital strategy.
The level of adoption is called organizational readiness. While some digital capabilities will be adopted more quickly (like unified communications), some digital capabilities require some more training or skilling initiatives (like low-code/no-code). The level of adoption depends on how the organization nurtures the skills of the employees who then drive the innovation process and manifest it into your business processes. This is how you truly enhance your digital capabilities.
These are further aspects to consider that can drive organizational readiness:
Are our employees well connected?
Do we need a center of excellence or user groups?
Does everyone have the resources needed to do their job?
How are people being trained to work in new ways?
Digital maturity and organizational readiness can be tracked as KPIs for your entire digital strategy — or for each strategic topic. Measuring digital maturity and organizational readiness by strategic topic delivers a good indicator that helps you to define or adjust your digital strategy.
Figure 1.4 shows an example of both values plotted by strategic topic. In this graph we see that the organization has plenty of digital capabilities for big data processing and cloud computing, but the employees are not yet trained accordingly. On the other side, the employees are ready for modern work, but the organization has not yet adopted the required digital capabilities.
Figure 1.4 Graph showing digital maturity and organizational readiness by strategic topic
Digital Maturity Assessment
A digital maturity assessment, shown in Figure 1.5, can help you to understand which digital capabilities are already available in your organization and if the organization is ready to use these capabilities. These questions are quite generic and should be seen as a rough blueprint that you can enhance and fine-tune for specific audiences within your organization.
The questions for this assessment are grouped by strategic topic and have two sections each.
Digital Maturity: The digital capabilities that are available in the organization
Organizational Readiness: The digital capabilities that are adopted by the employees
| Modern Work | |
| Digital Maturity | Organizational Readiness |
| How do you work together on the same document? | How do colleagues in your organization send a quick reminder? |
| ✓ Sending the document via email and consolidating it afterwards (0 points) | ✓ via email (0 points) |
| ✓ Working online together on the same document in real time (5 points) | ✓ via chat (3 points) |
| ✓ via integrated communication platform (5 points) | |
| Data Democracy & Analytics | |
| Digital Maturity | Organizational Readiness |
| What do you do when you need another type of aggregation in your report/dashboard? ✓ Nothing (0 points) ✓ Ask the BI department and wait some days (1 point) ✓ Copy data from the PDF report and perform some magic in Excel within hours (3 points) ✓ Use a self-service BI tool to modify this dashboard within minutes (5 points) | Do employees have access to analytics tools and data sources to ask questions of their own business data? E.g., an accounts-receivable specialist analyzing his own collection effectiveness rate or analyzing average days outstanding for invoices in a certain region ✓ No (0 points) ✓ Limited on certain teams/roles (3 points) ✓ Available for everyone (5 points) |
| Big Data Processing & Cloud Computing | |
| Digital Maturity | Organizational Readiness |
| Where is your organization's data stored? | How does your organization apply the term big data? |
| ✓ Somewhere on a network share (0 points) |
✓ Excel files that are larger than 50 mb (0 points)
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