How CIOs can help digitally mature organizations thrive
In order to effectively overcome myriad day-to-day disruptions, CIOs should strive to bring their organizations toward digital maturity. By doing so, they can reduce costs, comply with regulatory mandates, adapt to the latest technologies, and ensure that their customers and employees are satisfied.
Almost all organizations are digital; most of these organizations have comparable resources, talent, and tools. That said, not all organizations succeed. This is where digital maturity comes into play.
First of all, what is digital maturity?
Contrary to some viewpoints, digital maturity is not a destination or end goal. I prefer to think of it as a state of being, a manner of thinking, or a plane of higher consciousness.
Digital maturity makes a big, continuous impact on organizations’ digital transformation journeys. It’s all about organizations responding to situations appropriately.
Generally speaking, organizations are digitally mature once CIOs and other decision-makers can consistently respond to challenges in an appropriate fashion. However, digital maturity is more than that; it entails foreseeing disruptions, proactively preparing for the future, and utilizing data-driven decision-making to reach desired business outcomes.
It’s worth emphasizing that digital maturity is a collective endeavor. Although CIOs certainly play a central role, digital maturity involves breaking silos and bringing workflows across different parts of the company. CIOs should encourage their IT professionals to implement new ideas while also striking a balance between meeting users’ needs and assessing technology hype.
Reaching complete digital maturity involves three layers
Only by slowly and gradually ramping up can CIOs effectively bring their organizations to this state of digital maturity.
To begin with, CIOs need to have their organization’s technology infrastructure firmly in place. During the first layer, CIOs are getting their operations down pat; they’re making sure things like patching, network access policies, and user provisioning are up to par. Within this layer, CIOs are thinking operationally and tactically.
In the second layer, CIOs have gained a level of operational comfort, allowing them to think more strategically. With a solid understanding of their customers at this point, CIOs can now assess how the organization’s technologies can best facilitate the CIO’s strategies; these strategies may be related to analytics, observability, SIEM, UEMS, or any other operations.
Then, at the third and final layer, CIOs deliver upon their strategies to reach desired business outcomes.
It’s worth reiterating that digital maturity requires CIOs to bring corporate workflows across silos. For example, if consistent service management is a desired outcome, CIOs need to make sure that workflows seamlessly cut across the requisite departments. Similarly, to achieve an effective, organization-wide zero trust implementation, security needs to be weaved into every component of the infrastructure—from the core of the business to the edge.
CIOs are most concerned about business functions working productively; this means there are relatively few disruptions or degradation in customer experience, few incidents, and a strong overall security posture. In order to accomplish this, all the layers need to be working well; systems must be patched, there needs to be a good service management experience for the workforce, and workflows should be effectively cutting across functions. Highly mature organizations will have all of these pieces working well across the three layers.
It is important to have contextual intelligence—visibility at every level of the organization
CIOs tend to focus on problematic, high-level issues, such as revenue loss or a decline in customer satisfaction; however, they are only able to address these issues when they have insights into the lower, more strategic levels within the business.
One lower level, which is generally monitored closely by an IT manager, may involve insights into specific metrics, such as mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTTR), or average incident response time.
At an even lower operational level, it’s important to track metrics like the number of SQL deadlocks, volume of web traffic, or network bandwidth availability. Only through visibility into these metrics across different levels can organizations achieve complete digital maturity.
In highly mature organizations, CIOs are free to focus more on macro-level business outcomes because the layers beneath them are working well. With visibility into every level, CIOs are able to gain that contextual intelligence.
Key takeaways
In every business, disruptions are inevitable. That said, if an organization is digitally mature, it is easier to respond to that disruption in an appropriate way.
CIOs should know their customers’ needs while striving to earn their trust and provide them with omnichannel experiences. Importantly, CIOs must make appropriate technology choices, as all network, architecture, and access choices have compliance and cost ramifications.
Additionally, data-driven decision-making needs to be at the core of CIOs’ business strategies. Once CIOs have great operational activity in place, they can then execute their strategies and reach their desired business outcomes. Once the organization is digitally mature, CIOs also need to have effective disaster recovery policies, rapid incident response plans, and compliant risk management processes in place.
Put simply, it’s worth pursuing digital maturity; by doing so, companies gain competitive advantages, save costs, and create operational efficiencies.
And lastly, as a caveat, it’s worth noting that this process does not rely solely on a CIO or any other individual within the organization. Everyone has a role to play in this digital maturity journey.
