Maturity over transformation
Photo by sippakorn yamkasikorn on Unsplash
Earlier this month, the Charity Digital Skills Survey released an interim report which offers some eye-opening insights into digital transformation in the third sector.
One early finding is that 39% of respondents want additional funding to explore how to adapt their services in an online setting, 50% want guidance on digitising face-to-face services, and 50% want guidance on how to help their team adjust to change and stay motivated and productive.
These are just some of the many digital challenges facing the third sector. Delivering services in new ways will require making changes to most parts of an organisation. But that can sound too big and scary, or just too vague. With this in mind, I created my Digital Maturity Assessment to help organisations better understand how digital change impacts individual staff and wider teams.
Maturity over transformation
The word ‘transformation’ focuses on the idea of abrupt change, which can be off-putting. The word ‘maturity’, on the other hand, implies that change is an ongoing process. So if you're trying to make the case for digital maturity, it can feel more achievable and less alarming for your colleagues, senior managers and trustees.
“It’s not about technology, it’s about people” is a mantra often heard during discussions about digital transformation. But it’s not always entirely clear what this means in practice.
The Digital Maturity Framework enables all staff to see which areas of their organisation’s work (apart from website technology and social media) are being impacted by digital change. It’s already being used by digital leads in charities to make the case for digital change internally.
In the new version of the framework, 15 digital competencies are grouped into four areas:
Attitudes and foundations,
People, skills and processes,
Systems and information, and
Outputs and experiences.
The Digital Maturity Assessment should help your stakeholders embrace digital and help them understand their respective roles in finding solutions.
Current statistics (based survey responses so far) show that all the organisations who have responded are already somewhere along a maturity line in all four of the areas above. Digital maturity is a good framework for making organisations appreciate their achievements, as well as signposting where they need to go next.
Using the external to change the internal
External validation can be a handy tool in making internal change happen. Using a neutral external source to measure where you are widens out the issue of digital maturity and helps get people to take it seriously.
Helpfully, the Digital Maturity Assessment will show you how your organisation fares alongside the average ratings of all survey respondents over the years. While not necessarily comparing like with like, this comparison can be used to galvanise people.
In the end, it’s not just about getting the researched results. The usefulness of the Digital Maturity Framework depends on whether the person driving the digital maturity process uses it to take their colleagues along with them.
Making the case for change
Parkinson's UK have used the Digital Maturity Framework as an internal PR tool and an ongoing evaluation model. They adapted the framework to set organisational targets and map their progress going forward.
But the usefulness of the framework isn't restricted to large organisational change programmes already underway. One Digital Maturity Assessment user told me that they used it to make the case for new roles and more budget.
On top of this, the process of assessment can also uncover strategic needs that you may have missed. For example, Parkinsons UK ended up creating a new programme around data maturity after undertaking a Digital Maturity Assessment.
Agreeing on where you are
The Digital Maturity Assessment helps you understand where you are, and highlight different points of view within an organisation. I always recommend that a variety of people from a cross-section of teams should take the Digital Maturity Assessment. Afterwards you can discuss the differences in individual responses that inevitably surface.
In the new version of the assessment, every person taking the survey will get the summary of their response in an email and a unique link to their results on the website. This can be used to compare and contrast with other colleagues.
An exchange of views about why people evaluated things the way they did can be illuminating. If you facilitate that conversation and distil the insights, the evaluation process builds understanding across different stakeholders.
For example, an organisation’s IT team could think that the state of tech is excellent while the fundraising team think it's shocking. It's not that one of them is wrong; it just turns out that their focus is different. Before taking the assessment and discussing the results, they didn’t truly understand each others' needs.
What to do next
After you've done the assessment and discussed the results, agree with everyone what your priorities should be. Start with low-hanging fruit and then define medium and long-term targets and related activities.
If the priorities are not obvious, you may want your colleagues to do the assessment again, newly armed with the knowledge you've gained from the process.
Then, in a year's time, you can use the Digital Maturity Framework again to see how you've got on!
This version of Digital Maturity assessment launched in late February 2020. If you have feedback, questions or you need a hand in designing the digital change process, get in touch!
