The next growth opportunity for these digital experts is to perfectly eliminate the separation between the digital and physical worlds.

Evaluating digital readiness is a must. It helps businesses get an overview of the current status of the organisation and identifies any level of discourse. 

Digitisation is top priority for businesses across the globe. However, where most companies flounder is in the rush to jump into the digitisation bandwagon without evaluating their preparedness.

Research suggests that only seven per cent of leading businesses exhibit a digital-first and dexterous mindset, wherein they can self-organise, create partnerships around new digital initiatives and hold significant experience and skills in digital technologies.

Evaluating digital readiness is a must. It helps businesses get an overview of the current status of the organisation and identifies any level of discourse. Digitisation is all about transforming capabilities across operations and customer experience, for which an agile approach is required. Organisations that can sustain both capability and agility are true digital organisations.

So how does any organisation evaluate itself on digital readiness?

Any business needs to answer the following questions in these four areas to evaluate itself :

Culture: Will digitisation empower its employees?

Technology: How will it use and adopt emerging technologies?

Organisation: How aligned is it to support digital strategy, governance, and execution?

Insights: How effectively can it use customer and business data to measure success and inform strategy?

Once a business has positive answers to the above-mentioned questions, it’s time for it to delve deeper and further evaluate itself.

These are the 10 key questions, organisations need to ask themselves:

1. Does our competitive strategy depend on digitisation?

2. Does digitisation enable a better and well-defined cross-functional collaboration?

3. Does the board or CXO approve of and back the digital strategy?

4. Does every employee understand how their performance is tied with corporate digital goals? 

5. Do the vendor partners deliver value that enhances our digital competencies?

6. Do we have the right leaders to execute the digital strategy?

7. Do we have enough budget to invest in targeted digital education and training at all levels?

8. Do we have a flexible, iterative, and collaborative approach to technology development?

9. Does the business have clear and quantifiable goals for measuring the success of digital strategy?

10. Is the technology team measured by business outcomes and not just system up-time?

Depending on the answers to the above questions, businesses can slot themselves into four broad categories of digital preparedness, as follows:

Level1

Skeptics:

These companies have limited experience innovating or applying an outside-in approach to strategic planning. Their use of online sales channels is limited and they execute few digital marketing programmes. To adopt a more willing attitude towards digital adoption, such companies need to centralise their digital resources and at the same time, initiate a few path-finding projects to warm up their executives.

Level2

Adopters:

Such businesses have more digital practice than the sceptics. They are willing to invest in the basic architecture required to fulfil their digital ambition. For this, adopters will need to get dirty with digital, which means they need to scale up their internal resources and limit their dependency on outsourced expertise.

Level3

Collaborators:

These companies collaborate internally and externally to enable practice and innovation with digital. There is a strong coordination and regular communication between their marketing and IT teams. For these companies, the next level is to align skills and technology with the customer experience and master digital influence to drive sales.

Level4

Differentiators:

These companies have a strong revenue growth and are heavily online focussed. The next growth opportunity for these digital experts is to perfectly eliminate the separation between the digital and physical worlds.