What is the current state of your digital union?
Below, are some simple questions that can have very complex and profound answers for your digital business. In the journey to digital maturity, I’d recommend you start by making the investment to study and baseline your environment first by asking your organization these questions. A simple method is to create a focused tiger team to do this in an unbiased, thorough and time-boxed manner. A 30-day engagement culminating with a formal readout to your leadership team is a very effective way to initiate a company’s digital program.
What is your organization’s analytics maturity?
Analytics is a very broad term, with lots of vendors and even more hype. Monetization and marketplace solutions are everywhere. A friendly word of advice – be skeptical and don’t believe the hype. There is a continuum to measure maturity which is outlined below – it’s called the analytics maturity model. What kind of data analytics does your organization currently deliver?
- declarative reporting
- diagnostic reporting
- predictive machine learning
- prescriptive machine learning
- cognitive artificial intelligence
The questions of what kind of analytics and what is our organizational maturity are questions you should ask of your Chief Data Analytics Officer. If you don’t have one of those in your organization, look to the leader who generates the most revenue from data, or mitigates the most risk.
Have you deployed automation?
Like analytics, automation is another broad term. Does your organization have any customer-facing business processes that have been automated? If so, you’re on your way to becoming digital. An example here could consist of the ability for a customer reset their password, or to place a re-order of their most recent shopping cart by phone without talking to an employee of your company.
What is the total cost of ownership to maintain and managed your critical business processes, and is there an opportunity for efficiency and savings through automation? Embracing automation, and celebrating those who automate is a powerful way to transform your digital culture.
Do you have a culture of continuous improvement and innovation?
The agile scrum framework has some built-in features that enable these sort of cultural aspects. The ceremony called the retrospective is specifically designed to act as an improvement enabler. In the retrospective, the team is challenged to think specifically for ways to improve over the last sprint, or iteration of work. How much value is placed on this type of thinking within your organization? How many retrospectives did your company perform last quarter and what changes were made? How many successful recommendations for improvement were celebrated?
Another way to measure continuous improvement can also be seen in automation. How many changes to were made to your technology platform last quarter? Do you use continuous integration and delivery, or are the changes manual? Was the number of changes more or less than previous the quarter? How many failed customer interactions during the quarter were tied to changes, and was that less or more than the previous quarter?
How do you measure customer experience?
There are two very simple yet powerful measures of customer experience, one is very holistic whereas the other is more focused on technology engagements.
- Net Promoter Score
- APDEX
In general, both of these methods generate a score of your organization’s overall customer experience delivery based on comparing 3 distinct cohorts of customers within your total customer population (promoters/satisfied, neutral/tolerating and detractors/frustrated). When using these two methods, you can also compare your organization to your competitors and others in your respective industry.
How much profit was generated last quarter from your digital strategy?
What does it cost to deliver the your technology services and what revenues depend upon those services? Having a clear understanding of the total cost of ownership of your organization’s key technology services that enable your business is critical. Transforming services from a higher TCO to a lower TCO should be carefully vetted for ROI, and celebrated when delivered. The delivery of a lower TCO service that generates a return on investment is a show-back of your digital organization. Take time to recognize those wins as they can create a tidal wave of momentum. Internal quarterly business reviews are a great way for your technology team to demonstrate their show-backs to the company.