1. Cultural buy-in

You can’t have digital transformation without buy-in. And that’s not just for your employees: everyone from the C-suite down has to be on board with digital maturity.

Your mission should be to deliver amazing service or products through digital maturity; anything less will fail. This means creating a culture that encourages a “test and learn” approach where teams collaborate across departments to maximize growth.

2. Invest in talent

You need skilled employees to implement digital maturity. While you should hire for these skills, you can also increase your current employees’ digital competency, too.

You don’t have to completely change someone’s job description, but boosting their skills in other ways can help with transformation and retention. For example, train your marketers in HTML. Coach accounting on email automation. These skills are related to your employees’ existing jobs while contributing to digital maturity.

3. Build the infrastructure

After you have the culture and talent in place, it’s time to build an infrastructure for digital maturity. That means:

Securing your systems: Nefarious third-parties always want access to your data. Now that you’re working more with customer data, you need to secure it. Invest in the IT infrastructure to keep your information under lock and key.
Optimizing your data: How does data flow through your business? How do you use it? The data itself is valuable, but focus on the trends and insights you get from the data, not the numbers themselves.
Measuring key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs affect your bottom line. They’re essential to data-driven attribution, which helps you put your budget to its best and highest use. Track the metrics that are most important to you to adapt and become digitally mature.
Automating: Digital maturity means measuring every customer touchpoint. That’s way too much for your employees to do manually. Use automation and machine learning to automate these repetitive tasks. You won’t perfect this immediately, but it’s part of advancing your use of technology.

4. Start focused

You need infrastructure in place to support digital maturity so start with a channel that needs improvement and go all-in. Finance is a popular choice because it’s not directly customer-facing (like marketing) and usually results in easy wins.

You will want robust back-office systems in place before you overhaul high-stakes, customer-facing roles—admin, accounting, and IT need to be ready to offer support. For example, you might start with AP and then go to IT, then admin, then sales, then marketing. Your goals and mission should influence the order you choose.

5. Adapt your model

Digitally mature businesses change with the times but not without frequent struggles. One of the biggest changes you’ll need to make is your business model. This sounds scary to leaders, but in reality, shifting your business model will help you stay relevant in a changing global market.

You never know where digital maturity will take you. Embrace the future by adapting to the times. Use the digital maturity model to lean into the data, ask the hard questions, and move quickly to adapt your model.

Contact New Path Digital to learn how to get started evaluating your path to digital maturity!