What is Digital Maturity? How to Measure and Benchmark Your Business
Digital maturity is a structured approach that measures an organization’s ability to leverage digital technologies effectively across all aspects of business.
Digital transformation is often perceived as adopting new technologies, but it is more about integrating digital capabilities into the very fabric of an organization’s strategy, culture, and operations. Digital maturity is the key to accelerating and embedding new technologies within business operations effectively. It helps organizations understand how to achieve their digital transformation goals and maximize the impact of technology investments. By fostering a structured approach, digital maturity ensures that resources—both financial and human—are allocated efficiently, accelerating transformation while optimizing costs.
Companies that measure and improve their digital maturity embed digital transformation into their core operations, gaining a competitive advantage, driving innovation, and enhancing customer experience. Without an objective assessment, businesses risk falling behind their competitors.
In this post, we explore what digital maturity is, how to make the right assessment for your company and highlight resources to guide your next steps, all in a formal and data-informed perspective.
What is Digital Maturity?
Digital maturity is a structured approach that measures an organization’s ability to leverage digital technologies effectively across all aspects of business. It refers to an organization’s capacity to rapidly adapt to evolving technology trends and integrate digital tools in a way that creates sustainable value.
Achieving high maturity is challenging, evidenced by sobering statistics: roughly 80% of digital transformation initiatives fail to reach their objectives. Such a high failure rate underscores the importance of doing digital transformation right. Companies that succeed tend to excel across key dimensions, including leadership, strategy, technology, culture, and customer focus, and demonstrate higher maturity scores when compared to failures.
Why Digital Maturity Matters
Uncovers Transformation Gaps: Helps businesses identify where they stand in their digital journey, highlighting strengths and weaknesses.
Creates a Clear Roadmap: Helps create a step-by-step plan for digital transformation, aligning efforts with business goals.
Enhances Operational Efficiency: Optimizes workflows, reduces costs, and improves productivity by integrating the right digital tools.
Improves Customer Experience: Ensures seamless digital interactions, personalization, and better service delivery.
Encourages Data-Driven Decision-Making: Enables companies to make strategic choices backed by real-time analytics.
Ensures Sustainable Growth: A structured approach to digital transformation reduces the risks of failed initiatives and increases long-term success.
Digital Maturity Models
What is a Digital Maturity Model?
A Digital Maturity Model is a structured framework that helps organizations evaluate their current digital capabilities and chart a path for improvement. In essence, it breaks down the complex journey of digital transformation into defined stages or dimensions (such as customers, operations, technology, and culture) with criteria that indicate increasing levels of maturity. By using a formal model, businesses can assess where they stand and identify what’s needed to advance to the next level.
🔗 Learn more about digital maturity models and how you can choose the right digital maturity model for your company.
How to Conduct a Digital Maturity Assessment
A digital maturity assessment is an essential process that helps businesses identify strengths, weaknesses, gaps, and opportunities in their digital transformation efforts. Once you have selected a suitable model, the next step is to conduct a digital maturity assessment. This assessment is the process of evaluating your organization against the model’s criteria to determine your current maturity level in each area (e.g. strategy, culture, technology, etc.). Conducting a thorough assessment is essential – it serves as the fact-finding mission that will inform all subsequent digital strategy efforts. Without a candid assessment, any roadmap or investments you plan could be misguided. Conducting an assessment involves multiple steps such as:
Select the Right Model and Tool: Choose a structured framework and assessment tool tailored to your business needs.
Engage Key Stakeholders: Involve department heads, IT leaders, and transformation teams to ensure cross-functional input.
Data Collection: Use surveys, workshops, interviews, and digital analytics tools to gather insights.
Analysis & Interpretation: Evaluate findings to determine the organization’s digital maturity level.
Develop a Digital Roadmap: Create a structured plan to address identified gaps and prioritize initiatives.
Implementation & Tracking: Execute digital initiatives and track progress using defined KPIs.
Regular Assessments: Conduct periodic evaluations to measure improvements and refine strategies.
🔗 Find out how to assess your digital maturity step by step in this guide.
Digital Maturity Benchmarks
Achieving digital maturity doesn’t happen in a vacuum – context matters. This is where digital maturity benchmarks come into play. Digital maturity benchmarking is the practice of comparing your organization’s digital maturity results against an external reference, such as industry averages, competitors, or established standards. Incorporating benchmarks into your digital strategy is crucial for understanding what “good” looks like and setting ambitious yet realistic goals.
Key Benchmarking Considerations
Database Strength: Ensure the benchmark model uses a vast and updated dataset.
Relevant Comparisons: Compare against businesses with similar digital characteristics rather than just industry peers.
Clear Insights: Provide quantifiable metrics showing where a company leads and lags.
🔗 Explore our detailed guide on Digital Maturity Benchmarks for examples of benchmarking data and how to apply them to your strategy.
How to Improve Your Digital Maturity
Achieving digital maturity is not a one-time effort but a continuous process of transformation. Studies show that 80% of digital transformation initiatives fail, while only 20% lead to long-term success. The reasons vary—from unclear strategies to poor implementation—but companies that take a structured, data-driven approach significantly increase their chances of success.
Each organization has unique challenges and opportunities, making a tailored digital maturity strategy essential. However, there are universal best practices that successful businesses follow, and common pitfalls that should be avoided. Below, we explore some of the key steps organizations can take to drive their digital maturity forward and ensure their investments generate meaningful impact.
Key Steps to Drive Digital Maturity
Invest in Technology: Modernize legacy systems, integrate AI-driven insights, and leverage automation for efficiency gains.
Develop a Digital-First Culture: Encourage cross-functional collaboration, training, and upskilling to create a digitally fluent workforce.
Focus on Governance & Strategy: Align digital transformation initiatives with overarching business goals and ensure leadership buy-in.
Leverage Data & Analytics: Utilize real-time insights to improve decision-making, optimize workflows, and enhance customer experiences.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Lack of Strategy: Investing in technology without a clear digital transformation roadmap leads to inefficiencies.
Ignoring Cultural Transformation: People and processes are as vital as technology in digital transformation.
Leadership Misalignment: Digital transformation must be a company-wide priority, not just an IT initiative.
Failure to Measure ROI: Digital initiatives should have measurable impact and clear success metrics.
Slow Implementation: Delays in execution reduce competitive advantage.
Costly, Inefficient Assessments: Traditional consulting approaches can be slow and expensive; technology-driven assessments are more effective.
Case Studies & Best Practices
One of the best examples of a successful digital transformation is Nike. The company leveraged AI, automation, and real-time data analytics to personalize customer experiences, streamline supply chain operations, and launch digital-first retail initiatives. These efforts resulted in increased revenue, improved customer loyalty, and an enhanced digital shopping experience.
Another great case is Unilever, which implemented digital maturity assessments across multiple departments to standardize its global digital strategy. By focusing on real-time data collection and AI-driven decision-making, the company optimized its marketing efforts and accelerated product innovation.
Lessons from Failures
Not all digital transformation efforts succeed. Take Kodak, for example, which failed to adapt to digital photography despite inventing it. The company ignored the potential of digital technology and did not integrate it into its core strategy, ultimately losing relevance in the market.
Similarly, General Electric (GE) faced setbacks in its digital transformation journey by investing billions into its GE Digital initiative without a clear roadmap or industry-specific alignment. A lack of well-defined business objectives and internal alignment led to cost overruns and failed expectations.
Resources & Next Steps
Understanding Digital Maturity Resources
Achieving greater digital maturity is a journey, and fortunately there are many resources to guide organizations along the way. A crucial first step is to assess your current digital maturity level. Digital maturity models or frameworks – including digital maturity models, assessments, and benchmarks –provide structured evaluations of where your company stands across various dimensions. Conducting a maturity assessment shines a light on gaps and opportunities; it gives executives a clear vision of the “as-is” state and helps in setting realistic targets for the future.
In practical terms, an assessment might involve surveys, workshops interviews, and benchmarking against best-in-class organizations. The outcome often includes a maturity score or profile and tailored recommendations. Businesses can leverage these results to prioritize initiatives—focusing resources on areas that will yield the highest impact on performance and competitiveness.
Beyond assessments, investing in the talent is vital. Digital maturity is deeply linked to the skills and mindset of your workforce. Studies show that employees in digitally mature organizations have significantly more opportunities to develop and apply digital skills, which in turn drives retention and engagement. In fact, senior executives who lack digital growth opportunities are 15 times more likely to leave within a year compared to those who are empowered to innovate with new technologies. This is a striking reminder that providing continuous learning—through training programs, innovation labs, or rotational assignments in digital projects—is not just a nice-to-have but a strategic imperative.
Another set of resources involves external expertise and knowledge repositories. There is a wealth of research reports and case studies available from industry groups and consultancies. For example, the Digitopia produce annual reports on digital maturity that outline emerging trends and effective practices. Likewise, guidance from experienced partners can be invaluable. Engaging consultants or advisors who specialize in digital transformation can bring an outside perspective, proven methodologies, and mentorship for your teams.
Finally, planning next steps should involve setting a digital roadmap that incorporates quick wins and long-term goals. Quick wins (like automating a manual process or launching an improved mobile app) can build momentum and demonstrate value early. Meanwhile, the roadmap should align with the company’s strategic vision, perhaps aiming for specific improvements such as enhancing customer digital engagement or achieving a certain percentage of revenue from digital channels by a given year.
It’s crucial to monitor progress regularly against this roadmap. Using a dashboard of key performance indicators (KPIs) tied to digital maturity (e.g. digital sales growth, adoption rates of new tools, customer satisfaction scores online) will keep the transformation on track.
Leadership should review these metrics in governance meetings to celebrate successes and address slippages proactively. The journey doesn’t end with one project—digital maturity is an ongoing evolution. Organizations that excel continuously reassess their capabilities, learn from each wave of change, and set new benchmarks for improvement.
To effectively leverage all these resources, businesses must also foster a culture that embraces change. This means encouraging experimentation, rewarding initiative, and making it safe for employees to propose and pilot new ideas. As digital guru John Kotter famously noted, a change-ready culture can be the decisive factor between companies that thrive in disruption and those that falter. With the right resources in hand—be it knowledge, talent, or tools—and a committed leadership driving the effort, even companies currently lagging in digital maturity can make significant strides.
Free Digital Maturity Assessment Tool and Resources
Jumpstart your transformation with a complimentary Digital Maturity Assessment on the Digitopia Impact Platform. Gain invaluable insights into your organization’s current digital capabilities and unlock a personalized roadmap for strategic growth.
Discover a wealth of resources within Digitopia Impact Labs, designed to guide you through every stage of your digital maturity:
Digital Maturity Models and How to Select the Right One for Your Business
How to Conduct a Digital Maturity Assessment for Digital Transformation
