Matt O'Rourke

This content originally appeared on the W2O company blog

When it comes to digital maturity, there is no more reassuring concept than a well-conceived roadmap. Roadmaps are designed to bring clarity to an inherently uncertain process. A roadmap also suggests a specific destination, but, as we’ve already discussed in the first section of this series, digital maturity is an ongoing process.  

In practice, a roadmap can be very different. Often a grand vision is presented to senior leadership as a roadmap, leaving the team on a path forward that is difficult to negotiate. Conversely, a roadmap can become overrun with minutia to the point where it’s unreadable and susceptible to the smallest pivot. 

We advise clients on drafting a roadmap that is clear enough to communicate the vision of digital maturity, but flexible enough to hold up to any changes in environment, priority, or technology.   

1. Start with Goals, Strategic Initiatives, and Tactics

In last week’s section of this series, we discussed how to set up goals. Conveniently, these goals, strategic initiatives (SI), and tactics will inform your roadmap directly. Start by laying out your high-level goals and prioritizing them. Assign SI to the goals they support. If you do not think your current set of SI will complete your prioritized goal, don’t worry, you’ll have an opportunity to add more in later. Here is an example of what one digital maturity goal might look like.  

Goal 1. Move approval process from paper to digital  

SI 1—Complete RFP of digital approval vendors 

SI 2—Onboard vendors 

SI 3—Pilot with one department 

SI 4—Roll out 

2. Create a Backlog

You may hear a backlog referred to in different ways, but the general idea is that you need a place to store ideas that are not fully formed. You’ll regularly go back to the backlog and flesh out these concepts. To put meat to the bones of these ideas, you will need the major stakeholders and the people executing the digital maturity to work in one room. We often see that these sessions can contain a lot of back and forth, but the end result is an entire team that has a single vision of the path forward. Once this is achieved, these new items can be inserted into the roadmap. 

3. Be Flexible

The number one mistake when constructing a roadmap is locking a team into a year’s worth of work that is likely to change in three months’ time. To avoid this, make sure to align the specificity of the roadmap item with the timing of its execution. In the example above, the high-level goal of “Move approval process from paper to digital” can be scoped out to twelve or eighteen months. However, specific tasks under any of the SI, for example, “Open ticket with IT” will only be brought into the roadmap weeks in advance. The result will be constant goals with SI that span a few months and tasks that quickly come into the roadmap before they are completed.  

4. Socialize with Frequent Updates

Once the roadmap is in good shape, it should be socialized with management to gain alignment. Additionally, we often work with clients to use roadmap socialization as an opportunity to gain excitement with other internal stakeholders. Because the roadmap is updated frequently, it should also be shared on a regular basis—usually quarterly—to show how the digital maturity journey is evolving. In this way, the roadmap becomes not only the path forward for the team(s) involved in digital maturity efforts, but also the main socialization vehicle.   

Key Takeaways:

• Formulate a clear plan that is flexible enough to tolerate any unforeseen changes. 
• Establish goals, strategic initiatives, and tactics. 
• Create a backlog of underdeveloped ideas that can be revisited and enhanced. 
• Frequently share updates with interested parties.  

This content originally appeared in the W2O company blog.

Just like individuals, all teams have strengths and weaknesses. These can be pretty apparent when it comes to day-to-day responsibilities. However, strengths and weaknesses are less apparent when starting a digital maturity effort.  

To address this, we recommend teams complete a skills assessment, which is a quick and easy exercise to gain a collective view of a team’s competencies as well as skill gaps. The purpose of this exercise is not to point out any one team member’s deficiencies but rather to ensure the team collectively has the skills and expertise needed to execute digital maturity initiatives. 

Step 1: Identify Skills Needed 

First, teams need to take an inventory of what skills will be needed in their digital maturity efforts. Every situation will require slightly different expertise. However, a core set of capabilities are required for almost every team—we recommend the following skill areas: 

• Knowledge of existing (legacy) systems 
• Marketing tool knowledge 
• Collaboration tool knowledge 
• Analytics expertise 
• Finance expertise 
• UI/UX expertise 
• Marketing expertise 
• Project management expertise 

Step 2: Team Survey 

After identifying the most critical set of skills, a survey needs to be conducted for each team member to assess their own proficiency with regard to each. This survey should contain clear and detailed descriptions of both the skills and the ratings for each.  

Step 3: Identify Strengths and Weaknesses 

After the survey is complete, a clear view of strengths and weaknesses will come to light. In the hypothetical example below, the team is strong in many areas but needs improvement in skills 7 and 8. 

Step 4: Address Gaps 

There are multiple options to address skills gaps; we break them down into three basic categories—Train, Hire, Outsource. Which path to take largely depends on two things—how quickly does the skill gap need to be filled and how specialized is the lacking skill. 

Training existing team members has the clear benefit of costing much less than other options. It’s also important to realize that training team members on new skills will increase employee engagement and lower attrition. However, training also requires a lot of time that may leave a particular skill unaddressed for too long. Further, some skills are so specialized that it is impractical to train someone from scratch.  

Hiring new team members can not only close a skill gap, but can also increase the performance of the overall team. However, hiring can be a long process, especially when looking for a specialized skill set.  

Outsourcing skills to an agency, consultancy, or contractors is not always favored because it can be less cost–effective than training. However, outsourcing has the benefit of closing skills gaps nearly immediately and allows companies to utilize experts in specialized fields. Oftentimes W2O is hired by our clients to fill gaps in communications, marketing, or analytic functions. Further, we focus on knowledge transfer to our clients in order to ensure benefits well into the future. 

A helpful framework for deciding whether to train, hire, or outsource can be seen below: 

Filling these skills gaps is a critical first step to any digital maturity journey as it allows the team to be agile when address changing technology and business needs. Further, when team members transfer out of the team, using a skills assessment will make obvious what skills are needed from the incoming replacement. Much like the concept of digital maturity itself, the overall skill profile of a team is constantly evolving and the skills assessment is the tool to ensure critical functions are always being met. 

This content originally appeared in the W2O company blog.

Digital maturity starts and ends with people. It is an ongoing change process that requires fluidity. Ideally, this is driven by the culture and leadership of an organization. Both aspects create an environment for digital initiatives to thrive. However, we find ourselves in structures that are hesitant to change, and, in many companies, it is still more accepted to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. So how do we achieve digital maturity in organizations that are hesitant to change?

In our experience, making digital maturity a reality often comes down to influential and well-connected change agents who are open to innovation and continuously plant ideas and initiatives across the company. The people who are accelerating in digital don’t hesitate to take risks, launch pilots and share their learnings with the rest of the organization (even if they weren’t successful).

We’ve seen change agents in a variety of roles and functions – from human resources to procurement and in some instances even among legal, regulatory and medical teams. They are crucial in driving digital innovation. Typically, we find change agents as part of the following w stakeholder groups with varying levels of digital maturity and influence:

• Internal business stakeholders, such as brand or marketing teams, who have a specific business need or objective, which digital initiatives aim to address.
• Digital Center of Excellence (DCoE), such as digital planners or managers, who support business stakeholders as experts in planning and executing digital initiatives.
• External partners, such as agencies or consultancies, which bring high levels of specific expertise and knowledge to digital initiatives.

Roles and Level of Digital Maturity

While business stakeholders have a very strong understanding of a specific brand, category and business need, their experience with digital processes, platforms and functionalities can be limited. It’s not their job to be experts in the latest technological developments, but, rather, to focus on what is most beneficial to the brand and the business. They are often the owner of the initiative, budget holder and ultimate decision maker.

Members of the DCoE are able to bring together a solid understanding of the business needs with a broad understanding of digital platforms and channels. This enables them to enter each engagement with an internal perspective to assess the need for the given situation and the external knowledge of potential digital solutions. Their role includes defining the brief for the digital initiative and supporting the execution or helping select the right partner for execution. They are digital consultants to the business stakeholders and can share learnings across the organization.

External partners, such as agencies, are typically engaged for a specific area of expertise. If there is one key success factor in engaging these external partners, it’s to set clear expectations. Be transparent about why you are bringing in the external partner (do they provide a capability, experience or resource you’re lacking in-house?) and what you want them to do (do you want their advice on the approach or do you have a specific brief you need them to execute?).

Informed Decision-Making and Digital Pilots

The roles of these three stakeholders are clearly defined as long as there is a clear brief in place. It becomes challenging if the situation requires a new way of thinking and approach. Digital initiatives often don’t rely on proven and tested tactics. Through evolving demands in user behavior and experience, we have continuous access to new platforms, formats and channels. This opens opportunities, but also risks and creates a blurry definition of what the solution may look like, which makes it hard to secure buy-in from internal stakeholders.

In the absence of a strong and precise brief it can be helpful to include a trusted (external) partner at an early stage of the assessment and solution-defining process. (Yes, we all want to be part of this decision-making process, because we want to share our experience and help create better outcomes.) If you are concerned about a potential conflict of interest, you can decouple the consultation from the executional efforts.

We know there are many stakeholders already involved at this phase and navigating the politics internally is quite complex and time-consuming. At this point, the last thing the in-house team needs is another opinion. However, sharing a draft brief with an external partner for feedback can save time and costs, pressure test the scope of the assignment, or generate ideas for a potential pilot. The latter is a great way to mitigate risks, since they cover a short time period, require low investment, and focus strongly on measurement of potential outputs. This way, they allow for larger-scale projects if they demonstrate they can deliver the desired outcome.

In summary, change agents manage to bring together the right team of internal business stakeholders, who are open to pilot digital initiatives, and DCoE members, who understand the business need and can define the digital brief as well as select the right external partners. Launching scalable pilots can help mitigate risks and secure buy-ins from internal stakeholders. However, the process for creating and advancing digital maturity requires an honest skill assessment of internal teams and external partners to identify and address potential gaps. Find out how to best approach the skill assessment in part three of our series.

In September of 2019, while working Strategy at W2O, I consulted with a number of clients regarding digital transformation preparedness. Below is an introduction to that thinking with subsequent posts that introduce tools and frameworks.

Digital transformation is a term that has been prevalent throughout organizations across many industries for at least the last decade. Regularly cropping up in board meetings, annual reports and strategic planning, the term itself is often used to enable new types of innovation and creativity. However, the business questions that digital transformation is trying to answer haven’t substantially changed:

• How can we be more efficient?
• How can we measure our impact?
• How can we better connect with our stakeholders?

Digital Transformation is Ongoing

W2O has begun using the term digital maturity whenreferring to the status of the digital transformation taking place within our clients’ organizations. While digital transformation indicates an (often unachievable) endpoint, digital maturity allows us to quantify the ever-evolving processes, digital tools and platforms required. Let’s be honest – no company will be able to outpace digital change nor will technological evolution ever be completed. Therefore, the goals of digital maturity are readiness and agility rather than transformation.

As organizations face increasing pressure to keep pace with the speed of this technological evolution, compete in a crowded landscape, and battle for talent, we are seeing the gap in digital maturity widening. In healthcare, in particular, we have seen companies bring in expertise from outside industries to help them lead the pack.

While this is a good starting point, we must address the urgency and time pressure that a widening digital aptitude gap creates. Companies that do not move forward now will have more and more ground to make up once they start their digital maturity efforts. So it’s crucial that they establish platforms and frameworks for continuous experience and learning sharing.

Best Practices Established by W2O

In guiding many clients along their digital maturity journeys – from tech consulting, implementation and build, to analytics, governance, and training around digital channels – we have codified some best practices on how to establish and maintain digital maturity. Although there is clearly no one-size-fits-all process, tactical frameworks can be tailored to specific organizational needs – from small biotech companies to large, decentralized organizations with multiple business divisions. We will describe those frameworks in a series of blog posts right here over the next seven weeks.