Why Digital Maturity is Dead
In the now worryingly distant past of the 2010s, the term digital maturity was first coined and quickly established itself in the common parlance of business-speak. At its core, it’s a way of measuring how well a company had managed to integrate digital tools into their everyday working environment.
At one end of the scale, at level zero, there were the companies that had yet to embrace the digital revolution and were still using computers in the same way that they might use pen and paper. A slightly above this baseline were the companies that had incorporated websites and emailing into their internal and external comms, higher tiers of digital maturity included those that were using technologies that managed their online marketing campaigns.
The key point, however, is that the process of becoming digitally mature was like that of climbing a ladder with only one path to the top. An organisation would ascend each rung of technology sequentially until they reached the top.
However, things have changed a little since then.
A Brave New World
Since the first use of the term, technology has become ever more intertwined with business. Companies are now faced with an increasingly complex array of options and possibilities even when compared to only a short few years ago. Technology has become so ubiquitous that you’d be incredibly hard pressed to find a single organisation that didn’t use the web as its primary medium of communication or wasn’t digitally literate in some way, shape, or form.
Deciding on what technologies to use is no longer as simple as following the blueprint laid out by digital maturity. While you’ll still find the term in use almost everywhere, it’s now more of a marketing buzzword.
Problems, Not Technologies
So, if businesses can no longer just follow a simple path to becoming digitally mature, what should they do instead?
The most important thing to remember in today’s world is that the central issue that must be considered is no longer the technology involved, but the problem that it’s being applied to. There’s a seemingly infinite number of solutions on the market now, each with its own particular set of pros and cons.
In order to make the right decision, an organisation needs to fully understand the problem that it’ll be tackling, and itself. This means not just looking at the solutions that are appropriate for the present but those that will provide value long into the future.
As an organisation evolves, so do the problems that it faces. No problem can be fixed indefinitely, as such the best solutions are the ones that have the capacity to evolve alongside the organisation that’s using them.
Companies that fail to think about problems in the long-term will quickly find that it’s significantly harder to stop using a tool than it is to start using it even if it’s no longer fit for purpose.
This is where ACTUM can help. We help companies think about the problems that they’re facing holistically so that they can choose the right for them in the long term.