Abstract
This chapter aims to create a general framework on digital maturity models and reveal the highlights of the commonly used components of digital maturity models. The emphasis will be more on detailing human-related fundamental aspects of digital maturity models rather than the technological ones. Considering the incrementally increasing options to reach collaboration technologies and swift deployment of them to different sectors, the main challenge still remains as to manage the psychological asset related parts. Although technology is generally perceived as mechanical, whose boundaries can be drawn, tasks to be assigned can be defined; the technological elements within the concept of digital maturity also intersects with the human-related dimensions of digital transformation. The study aims to advise a systematic approach by offering a theoretical framework to manage human-related factors in a digital transformation journey with an inclusive perspective positioning technology as the core medium provider and contributes to the theoretical background in the field of study.
TopIntroduction
The concepts of digitization, digitalization and digital transformation have become more and more audible in daily and corporate life, with the rapid development in the capabilities of technological opportunities and their presentation to larger masses in a more economical manner. This popularity usually ends up with the misunderstanding of these concepts even at the corporate world which highlights the need to assimilate the building blocks of the aforementioned concepts to ensure that the practitioners can effectively benefit from the ameliorating power of digital transformation in complex systems or in daily routines and operational practices.
The Covid-19 pandemic has acted as a directional impulse for many corporations, some of which have linked digital transformation as a savior to their sustainability (Agrawal, 2020; Bai et al., 2021), and majority of the others concentrated on their efforts to improve and make their digital processes perfect.
This chapter will introduce digital maturity models and highlight the important considerations of the commonly used components of featured digital maturity models to facilitate generation of a handy framework. The emphasis will be more on detailing human-related fundamental aspects of digital maturity models rather than the technological ones, since how human factor is utilized is regarded as the main source of differential value creating component in a digital transformation progress. On the other hand, such a content framing is necessary to handle such a broad topic in a chapter.
As it will be detailed throughout the chapter; although, technology is generally perceived as something mechanical, whose boundaries can be drawn, with what assigned tasks can be clearly defined, and even its course and journey to corporate goals are more easily manageable; the technological elements within the concept of digital maturity also intersect with the human-related dimensions of digital transformation. This intersection is a requirement of the role of human in an organizational setting, in other words, psychological capital that is integrated into ecosystems that are forming a meaningful whole. This situation creates a need to make some suggestions that will also be related to the technological elements of digital maturity throughout the chapter.
Digital maturity levels, on the other hand, are an inseparable measure of digital maturity concept that reveal the level and intensity of these concepts being applied within an organization, and in a way, they reveal the gap that a company has to cover in order to reach an acceptable maturity in digital transformation. Assessing digital maturity levels in an organizational setting also serves not only as a monitoring activity, but also as a starting point to reveal the current situation used as a check-up to offer the right prescription. Digital maturity level/stage assessment is to be mentioned to bind the efforts to an undeniable need to make progress, and adopt to the evolving needs of a business and an organization’s requirements in time. The psychological asset involvement in the digital maturity journey brings a dynamic perspective and nature into existence.
While detailing these related dimensions, their roles in a digital transformation journey will also be explained, which will also include highlighting useful attributes of digital maturity dimensions. The need to sustain a progressive nature at digital transformation is also to be mentioned as products, services, technologies can become obsolete or they can change and get updated in a business environment; such a transformation will require organizations to catch up with contemporary ways of creating value (De Santos & Francisco, 2021).
The main purpose of this chapter is to offer an understanding of a digital maturity framework and detail the main aspects to take care of during a digital transformation remembering that digital maturity is not a destination, instead it is journey that would be applied in a holistic way.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Industry 4.0: Indicates the 4th Industrial Revolution; it is a form of swift digital transformation where systems, machines and industries are integrated using smart automation and digitized connectivity tools.
Digital Ecosystem: A distribute, cooperative, open socio-technical system with properties of self-adaptive organizational flexibility, scalability, extended organizational boundaries and resilience.
Digital Strategy: Using digital resources to fulfil customer expectations and to digitally transform business processes with an open-minded mentality to triumph in business models.
Digitalization: Utilization of digital tools and technologies to modify a business model and generate chance and enable new opportunities for deciding about actions to be taken.
Collaboration: Collective engagement of contributors in a coordinated effort to solve an issue, a problem, or an incident together.
Digital Maturity: Adapting an organization to challenge effectively in increasingly digitalized ecosystems.
Digitization: Process of converting analog data to digital form. Its target is to become paperless, transforming into bytes.
Digital Transformation: Incorporating digital technologies into daily corporate life to run routine or new to the earth activities by forming new processes or by updating them making use of digital technologies and tools to fulfill and adapt to market, customer, and business demands.