MAGAZINE NO.27 Digital Maturity Scale: where does your company rank?

While 2020 was the year of collective awareness, particularly on the part of SMEs, about the need to take a concrete step toward digitization, it is also true that that profound change, which would enable businesses to open up to new avenues and opportunities, is still struggling to take shape.

Small and medium-sized enterprises, in fact, are still at a preliminary stage of digital transformation, despite the fact that they generate about 41 percent of national turnover, cataloging themselves among the country's most driving realities. The negative effects of the pandemic have spared no one, a reason that pushes even (and especially) SMEs to an organizational and technological re-planning that, although in the common imagination is considered fundamental, in reality there are several mechanisms that still hinder its action.

There are many reasons for this, and they cannot be attributed solely to economic factors; after all, the government, too, has given a fundamental impetus for the purposes of digital transformation with the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRP), a strategic plan that reserves 27 percent of the approximately 222 billion euros planned in total for digitization; other tough stumbling blocks to be tackled concern cultural aspects in the digital sphere, as well as the skills one possesses to be able to face change with serenity and succeed in carrying it through over time.

But what is really meant by "change" in digital?

A word that has always known different schools of thought in which on the one hand it is understood as a leap into the void and on the other as a step toward a range of new challenges and opportunities; a clear division, then, that is enshrined in society with the digital divide and that slows the country's growth toward an increasingly necessary digital maturity.
A concept, the latter, that the Osservatorio Innovazione Digitale nelle PMI (Digital Innovation Observatory in SMEs ) recently tried to interpret in order to better understand the levels of digital maturity of Italian Small and Medium Enterprises; in this regard, a survey involving 1038 companies was launched from which emerged an undoubted acceleration toward low-level digitization limited, therefore, to immediate business operations in response to Covid.
In fact, the extrapolated data shows that about 43 percent of the surveyed companies are still unable to find a real startup, as well as to take on strategic value from a business and planning perspective. The Observatory then identified a number of indicators to outline a clear breakdown of the approaches to digital taken by companies:

Analog Approach
Includes those SMEs that still manually manage internal processes (7%), are not familiar with ERP technologies (58%), and find investment in digital too expensive (71%)

Timid Approach
Includes those SMEs forced to digitize certain processes by laws and regulations-think electronic invoicing-or by new needs triggered by the pandemic (40%)

Convinced Approach
These are those SMEs that, in addition to having digitized various business processes, also show a strategic and long-term approach with the help of new technologies (44%)

Advanced Approach
Concerns the most forward-looking Small and Medium Enterprises, with an openness to global markets and supported by a good command and knowledge of digital technologies (9%)

Although that of digitization is a topic that has been analyzed and mentioned many times on numerous working tables highlighting its undisputed advantages, even today it is still difficult to circumscribe all its actual declinations; in order to be able to start a digital transformation project, it is necessary first of all to be clear about the direction you want to take, but above all to keep well in mind the complexity that may hide the approach to digitization that you want to use in your organization.

Hypothesizing a "digital maturity ladder" can help to better understand the plateau in which a company that wants to embark on (or has already embarked on) a digital growth program is placed and what the differential elements are that enable the leap from one rung to the next.

According to the proposed scheme, we can imagine that the path to digital maturity starts from a level of Digitization, and then continues with Digitalization, rising to the level of Digital Solutions and finally reaching Digital Business.

Let's take a detailed look at what each of these steps entails.
The first step, Digitization, sees included all those organizations that equip themselves with the basic tools to make a way of working more efficient. We are talking about the use of individual productivity tools such as Word, Excel, Mail or the creation of websites. A shift, then, from physical/paper-based operations to a similar virtual operation.
Digitalization brings with it the concept of adaptation: business areas organize themselves to improve their operations by reducing costs and transforming "physical processes" into more efficient, automated or semitile virtual processes.

When we talk about Digital Solutions we are referring instead to the concept of integration. An integration not only between organizational units, but an integration that adds value to the work of people, to the relationship between the organization and, for example, its customers, enabling a digital continuum that goes beyond the corporate walls.
Only the last step, however, that of Digital Business, brings with it the concept of Innovation, itself perceived by corporate ownership as the very instrument of profit. The organizational model undergoes a digital reimagining that is light years away from the mere introduction of applications into the organization.

To achieve whole-business digital maturity and differentiate yourself in the marketplace, it is critical to understand where your company is placed, plan the level you want to get to, and adopt technologies and methods that can turn strategy into action, with the aim of taking your organization to its own level of possible maturity and scale as you go.

A long-term strategic approach allows any organization to grow and, therefore, not anchor itself to only one of the steps toward digital maturity; technology such as Jamio allows the enterprise to be propelled toward higher and higher steps without onerous investments, thanks in part to the application development tool made available by the platform that allows, without knowing programming languages (no-code development), application solutions to be quickly modeled and adapted from time to time to the organizational context.

The more digitally mature the company becomes, the more Jamio evolves into a new maturity.

A panacea for businesses that want to grow rapidly without taking on additional costs in technology, since the scalability of the Jamio cloud platform allows for this, with the use of the language of the business replacing programming codes and the cost of a subscription instead of single multiple investments.

Editorial by:

Ivan Giuliani
Marketing & Digital Coordinator Openwork

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