Section 1: Benchmarking Your Digital Transformation Journey
To plan your digital transformation journey, you need to understand where you are today—a process that involves assessing your own digital maturity (including cataloging the digital initiatives you already have underway), as well as benchmarking yourself against your middle market peers.
Assessing Your Own Digital Maturity
Assessing your current digital state is critical to setting attainable goals, maximizing existing assets, and developing an executable roadmap grounded in reality. While competitive benchmarking should be performed in the context of industry, in general, businesses should follow a digital maturity assessment framework. At BDO, we refer to our proprietary digital transformation framework as our Digital 3+1 approach.
This approach features three key areas of transformation: business model maturity (Digital Business), operations maturity (Digital Process), and IT maturity (Digital Backbone).
These three transformation areas overlap and are inextricably connected—and will become even more interlocked as your organization becomes increasingly digital. Having a solid baseline understanding of how you rank in each area can help you identify and bridge critical gaps, and move you closer to achieving
your vision.
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Benchmarking Against Your Peers
The second benchmarking consideration is simple: How do you stack up against your middle market peers? While each industry is different, benchmarking can help you determine the priority areas of focus for your digital transformation efforts.
1. What’s Your Status? Current Digital Transformation Plans
2. How Will You Oversee It? Steps Taken to Facilitate Effective Oversight of Digital Objectives
3. What’s Your Approach? Current Approach to Digital Transformation
4. How Much Are You Spending? Spending Plans for Digital Investments
5. How Are You Paying for It? Financing Plans for Future Digital Investments
6. What Digital Enablers Are You Betting On? Current & Planned Deployments of Advanced Technologies
7. How Strong is Your Digital Backbone? Current IT Infrastructure’s Ability to Integrate Advanced Technologies*
*Based on participants’ self-reporting
8. How Do Your Digital Capabilities Compare? Self-Comparison to Industry Peers
BDO INSIGHT
While many executives may think highly of their current IT infrastructure’s ability to integrate advanced technologies—along with how their digital capabilities compare to those of their industry peers—the fact is, that’s not always reflective of reality. As our survey reveals, the resulting answers vary widely, depending on the participant’s title level, organizational size, and industry.
Answers between tech (e.g. CIO, CISO, CTO) and non-tech (e.g. CEO, CFO, COO, CMO) C-suite executives, for example, often differed significantly: 78 percent of non-tech C-suite executives cite their organization’s IT integration capabilities as “very good” or “excellent,” compared to only 48 percent of tech C-suite executives.
Similarly, 45 percent of non-tech C-suite executives rate their company’s digital capabilities as “advanced” compared to their peers, versus only 26 percent of those in the tech C-suite. These differences imply that executives, even in the same organization, don’t necessarily share the same awareness or understanding of their organization’s digital capabilities—with non-tech C-suite executives’ views tending to be more favorable than those in tech roles.
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