Digital Maturity: How To Assess It?

One of the recur­ring issues with my clients is the rev­o­lu­tion brought by the dig­i­tal: many com­pa­nies have indeed dif­fi­cul­ties to set the objec­tives of their dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion. How­ev­er, before defin­ing a vision, it is essen­tial to know from where we start, to mea­sure its cur­rent lev­el of “dig­i­tal matu­ri­ty”. This dig­i­tal matu­ri­ty is sim­ply the abil­i­ty of com­pa­nies to iden­ti­fy how dig­i­tal can help them. But how can a com­pa­ny assess its abil­i­ty to act and clar­i­fy its vision of dig­i­tal, in com­par­i­son with oth­er com­pa­nies from its sec­tor or geo­graph­i­cal area?

Much has already been estab­lished in rela­tion to the notion of dig­i­tal matu­ri­ty and the dif­fer­ent ways to eval­u­ate it. Dig­i­tal Matu­ri­ty Mod­els have espe­cial­ly been cre­at­ed, allow­ing any orga­ni­za­tion to self-report. Nev­er­the­less, it is nec­es­sary to deep­en the thoughts and to ask the right ques­tions: am I mature regard­ing the major dig­i­tal chal­lenges? What does it mean in terms of tech­nol­o­gy, user expe­ri­ence, and sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of process­es? Am I aware of my strengths and my weak­ness­es? How can I posi­tion myself in rela­tion to oth­er com­pa­nies, whether or not they are direct competitors?

Adobe Marketing Score, a free and simple tool to assess digital maturity

In order to achieve this, Adobe has devel­oped a free tool, Adobe Mar­ket­ing Score, enabling clients to ques­tion them­selves on key top­ics, to think about their posi­tion­ing com­pared to oth­er com­pa­nies, to iden­ti­fy their strengths but also to work on areas to improve. This tool is orga­nized around sev­en key issues of dig­i­tal marketing:

• Glob­al Dig­i­tal Matu­ri­ty (web con­tent, social com­mu­ni­ties, mobile expe­ri­ence, or personalisation)
• User Expe­ri­ence and its imple­men­ta­tion (staff, process­es, products)
• Ana­lyt­ics and the abil­i­ty to use data (col­lec­tion, analy­sis and automa­tion data, but attri­bu­tion models)
• Cam­paign Man­age­ment (cus­tomer data, dif­fer­ent chan­nels, cam­paign opti­miza­tion, man­age­ment analyses)
• Man­age­ment of Adver­tise­ments (track­ing, seg­men­ta­tion, allo­ca­tion mod­el, or cus­tomer experience)
• Social Net­works (pres­ence on net­works, engage­ment rates, cus­tomer rela­tion­ship management)
• The abil­i­ty to opti­mize and tar­get (cul­ture, strat­e­gy, leadership …)

Each of these top­ics con­tains 30 to 45 ques­tions, for which you need you eval­u­ate your­self with a cur­sor. This is very fast and takes only twen­ty min­utes, know­ing that it is advised to focus only on 2–3 issues to start.

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Adobe Mar­ket­ing Score offers two major advan­tages. Ini­tial­ly, the tool pro­vides a score out of 5 for a giv­en top­ic, and a detailed report in order to be able to posi­tion your­self regard­ing a sec­tor, but also to set goals and pri­or­i­tize areas of devel­op­ment. Sec­ond­ly, it is also an excel­lent oppor­tu­ni­ty to think about ques­tions that you haven’t yet asked your­self on a spe­cif­ic topic.

Of course, it is essen­tial to keep in mind that the tool doesn’t give, by itself, the answers, but allows before every­thing to ask your­self the right ques­tions, and to open new avenues for thoughts. It is then impor­tant to keep on work­ing in col­lab­o­ra­tion with con­sult­ing firms to obtain from this ini­tial report the very sub­stance: to pri­or­i­tize focus areas for the devel­op­ment of the com­pa­ny and to build a real dig­i­tal strategy.

What about you, what do you think of the con­cept of dig­i­tal matu­ri­ty and the dif­fer­ent ways to eval­u­ate it? Have you tried the Adobe Score Mar­ket­ing tool? Feel free to share your expe­ri­ences in the comments.