Have you been baffled by terms like Digital Maturity Model, DMM, or DMM Assessments? Have you been asked or offered to take a DMM Assessment without clearly defined expectations on the outcome? Then this is the article for you.
Professional agencies are working hard to define frameworks or models around digital maturity and naming them with eye-catching phrases to woo prospects, one of them that we constantly come across is “Digital Maturity Model (DMM) Assessments”. Essentially, with a DMM an assessment of the client’s digital maturity is done by posing a simple set of questions related to their current software systems and processes irrespective of the client’s business domain and industry, at the end of which they automatically generate a pre-programmed assessment report which highlights how digitally mature is the client’s business.
Sounds like a great marketing tactic! But what the agencies do not factor in is the reality that the idea of Digital Maturity Assessment means different for different businesses and it cannot be generalized for all domains and sectors. More precisely, digital maturity assessments cannot be based on simple questions & answers.
The fact is each business is unique and the way they operate has a business reason. For example, a certain eCommerce company may be calculating the sales tax for their online orders leveraging an on-premise custom tax table and this may be for a reason, the company may be applying taxes on an order which qualifies certain criteria like demographics, exemptions, order values, and other rules, etc. They may not be using a more accurate cloud-based tax system, because they have too many business rules to be applied and these cloud systems may just not be able to support it, this does not mean the company is digitally immature on their taxation process.
Digital maturity assessment is an intense exercise carried out by techno-functional experts who specialize in the client’s business domain and the technology ecosystems. The techno-functional experts focus on every detail from systems and process perspective, the entire exercise requires seamless collaboration with business stakeholders and understand their “day in the life of” and relate them to the best practices. They identify bottlenecks, areas of improvement, and make concrete recommendations on systems & process optimizations providing a roadmap for the client’s digital journey.
The need for businesses is to define a checklist of evaluation criteria to identify the right agencies through who just do not recommend short term solutions but an agency that can prepare them for the challenges of tomorrow.
At Trika, we deliver strategic digital consulting and transformation services through techno-functional experts specializing in the area of retail, manufacturing, distribution, and various other segments.
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