Keep an eye on your competitor's rising Digital maturity levels

I agree it’s not easy for companies to grasp what digital transformation exactly entails because it’s a complex concept and there are no precedents to follow for the uniquely daunting problems it poses.
By default, the hi-tech firms Google, Microsoft, Apple … are the pioneers driving the digital revolution. But the question now arises if there is any pattern to the digital maturity levels of the rest of the business world. Are there any identifiable stages various industries are currently operating at?
Trying to gauge a company’s level of digital maturity isn’t easy when many of the companies are still struggling with making sense of this technology’s concept in the first place. Even to the companies that are in the process of digitization, the digital transformation concept connotes a lot of dissimilar ideas.

The stages of digital maturity
A comprehensive study by Capgemini Consulting helps simplify the stages of digitization for us. Capgemini’s four stages, namely, Beginners, Conservatives, Fashionistas and the Digirati, have created an easy barometer to assess the digital maturity levels in the business world. Here’s a break-up.

1. Digirati: These companies as the name suggests, are the digital stars, the glitterati and the pioneers in digital transformation and management! They have tech visionary leaders, they invest in acquiring the digital resources for the technology adoption and are successfully managing the processes for actual revenue generation. Industries in this category: High Technology giants are the top digirati, followed by Banking, Financial Services and Retail (but these are not as mature as High Tech giants).

2. Fashionistas: These companies tick most of the boxes for digital transformation; they are the ones who have experimented with ‘fashionable’ digital applications as one-off experiments, but they do not have a unified strategy or long-term vision and are not using these technologies for actual revenue generation. Industries in this category: Telecom and Travel.

3. Conservatives: These companies are the skeptics when it comes to new technologies, although they have a vision and effective structures in place to govern technology adoption. Industries in this category: Insurance and Utilities.

4. Beginners: These companies use the traditional email, internet and other business software. But they are not harnessing the advantages of the more advanced digital technologies like analytics. Industries in this category: Manufacturing industry and Pharmaceuticals.
It was the music CD industry’s low digital maturity that lead to its demise
If anyone still has doubts about why they need to embrace digital technology before it’s too late, just picture the grim fate of the almost non-existent Music CD manufacturing industry! In fact, my unused collection of music CDs that’s now gathering dust, is for me the most-in-your face reminder of how new-age online digital music sources and mobile music apps completely wiped out the multi-million dollar conventional CDs manufacturing industry! Ditto for the Home DVDs manufacturing industry as Apple TV and Netflix caught the consumer’s fancy! Several companies in the music and home entertainment industry must have been forced to shut down their operations, but the smarter companies diversified their businesses to move away from the conventional operations and they did this by heeding the warning early on and accepting the harsh reality that the entertainment lovers were all very tech- savvy and embracing a new technology and that businesses needed to follow suite.

In a May 2015 report, The Guardian summed it up as below: With hindsight it’s clear that nobody had foreseen the death of the CD, because the medium was just too successful. It was so popular and profitable that the music industry couldn’t imagine life without it. Until it had to!

Well, almost always, every new technology garners a euphoric cheer from company leaders initially. But they need to rein in the skeptics and the naysayers before it’s too late (as was the case with the CD industry), as they step in and bring reasons of cost of business disruption to oppose the digital shift. Therefore, it’s important to spread the word around to make the naysayers aware of the industry peers’ digital maturity.