In a world where technology is reshaping how organizations operate and empowering customers like never before, it has never been more critical to bring digital excellence to your organization.
Excellence in digital transformation comes from marrying organizational objectives and capabilities with user needs, objectives, and jobs-to-be-done, while leveraging technology to accelerate all facets of product and service development.
This necessitates identifying and intimately understanding the diverse markets your organization serves, defining outcomes over features, and defining technologies and processes that optimize your organization toward improved decision-making.
In short, your organization risks profound disruption if technology isn’t a core competency.
The facets of digital maturity
Digital transformation is difficult because it covers so many factors, from research to systems architecture to continuous improvement. In total, there are 7 primary factors your organization needs to develop as core competencies:
- Research
- Product strategy
- Interaction design
- System architecture
- Build
- Launch and promotion
- Continuous improvement
A typical digital project will include this depth of requirements and the skillsets required to execute effectively across these standards of practice. Within each of these areas, there are a series of capabilities and requirements to consider, as detailed in our article, “Why digital excellence is so hard to achieve.”
If your technology decision-making and operational practice are not yet mature, you may find these common challenges familiar.
Typical challenges of achieving digital excellence
- Having limited capability in any one of the 7 key areas, where it is difficult to execute well and project team expertise is not deep enough to achieve best practices. This can increase cost significantly upfront or over time and diminish the value of products and services.
- Trusting a single vendor to have the capability of executive across all 7 of these multi-disciplined steps, each of which requires a high level of expertise.
- Taking a technical or engineering-driven approach led by features-first and, at best, internal definitions of need instead of taking a human-centred design approach that identifies user jobs-to-be-done and outcomes to align organizational goals and user needs.
- Transitioning from research and strategy to product. Bridging the gap between identifying an opportunity to improve customer experience or service delivery and how this is translated to service models and products requires a unique set of cross-functional capabilities.
- Not aligning information architecture and interface design to user mental models rather than feature lists and organizational requirements.
- Not effectively translating from design to code, with optimized and accessible front-end code that puts the user first, where typical engineering- team capabilities are most robust at the architecture and back-end, instead of at layers where users interact.
- Minimal continuous improvement. Using the knowledge gathered from every click and communicating with users on an ongoing basis is essential to improve service and product.
- Lacking effective, ongoing technology decision-making. The ability to track performance, effectively run user tests and experiments, learn from data and insights, and make the most effective decisions on spending ongoing resources to drive adoption and engineering improvements.
Ultimately, success in the connected age requires a breadth of expertise and a depth of digital maturity and capability to maintain market-leading product, service, and customer experience standards.
We’ll help you grow your digital maturity towards improved product, service, and organizational decision-making
Learn more about digital excellence and our organizational needs and digital maturity assessments service, or get in touch to discuss how we can help you optimize how you work towards reduced product and service development costs and improved customer experience.