Finding Your Place On The Digital Evolution Curve

In organizational leadership, understanding digital evolution and knowing where your company falls on the curve allows you to be prepared and develop a clear path forward — far past the digital faultline. So, if you haven’t already, it is crucial to focus on your company’s digital maturity by taking a cold, hard look in the mirror to pinpoint where you stand on the digital evolution curve.

This is not only critical for technology companies. All companies must leverage this ability to know how they stack up against comparable organizations in their industries, as well as to examine the digital IQ of their leaders. 

I went through this process with my company, Trianz, and this is how we developed the Digital Enterprise Evolution Model (DEEM). We wanted to find our own data-driven answers and illustrate the different stages of our digital maturity over time.

Increasing Leadership’s Digital IQ for Transformation Success

The digital IQ of your leaders is the single most important factor on which every other factor in your digital journey is dependent upon. When the collective leadership of an organization has a high digital IQ, there is a compounding influence on all other factors, dramatically increasing the likelihood that the company will make progress in the right direction. 

On the other hand, when leaders are not digitally self-aware and do not understand the customers, technology, or business model changes in their industry, the company will find itself in a precarious situation. Lacking a fact-based decision-making process to address seismic shifts like we’re seeing in the marketplace will lead to actions on all fronts being misprioritized, erratic, and inefficient. Outcomes will be uncertain and I’m afraid many companies struggling to find answers now will not make it past the faultline.

Your leadership needs to be aligned on this mission and digitally self-aware to comprehend what digital evolution means for your company. Even then, the process will take time and analysis for key performance indicators to show a clear transition away from the digital faultline and toward the future.

This is why I wrote Crossing the Digital Faultline, to help other leaders find their own answers to questions about leadership, digital maturity, cybersecurity, and transformation. The book offers insights on assessing your organization’s standing and competitiveness on the digital evolution curve. Think of it as a self-assessment and roadmap for digitally transforming any organization.

Evolving During Times of Uncertainty

The pandemic has posed many unprecedented and ongoing challenges for leadership. We as business leaders must ask ourselves: If front-line medical workers, governments, law enforcement, and essential workers are facing these challenges head-on, what is it that we are doing to push our organizations — not just to survive, but to reinvent beyond the pandemic? 

This is what digital evolution is all about — knowing exactly where you are and how to move past challenges using data-driven analysis. This process will give you the tools you need to drive your company past the faultline and into the digital age.

Source: Forbes