Advancing digital maturity can only happen if teams are provided enough resources. Optimized organizations consistently audit their tools and processes to remove roadblocks. This ensures resources—like people, time, and money—are used effectively.
Our research found that only 28% believe their organization is very prepared to take advantage of opportunities in the market. This means a majority of businesses struggle to quickly adapt to the changing needs of customers, leaving those businesses vulnerable to competitors who are better positioned for change.
When we segmented this data by digital maturity, an astounding 74% in the Limited stage say they aren’t very prepared. You can see that the more digitally mature an organization is, the more prepared it feels to take advantage of opportunities.
So why are less digitally mature organizations struggling to adapt and scale? We found it’s fairly standard for organizations of all digital maturity levels to rely on IT for their workflow automation needs. In fact, 44% of organizations rely on IT to build workflows. But where organizations differ is in their ability to access IT resources to build and modify workflows.
61% of Optimized organizations rarely or never have their projects delayed due to a lack of technical resources. Yet more than half of organizations in the Refined, Invested, and Limited stages report being delayed sometimes or often.
We also found that organizations in lower stages of digital maturity are less likely to know which systems require the most time from employees to maintain. In fact, 47% of Invested and 70% of Limited organizations don’t track this data at all. This means these organizations can’t identify which systems are causing projects to be delayed.
If organizations focus on identifying which systems cause the most constraints, they may be able to replace these systems and free up some technical resources, including IT time. Without this action, technical delays will continue to keep companies from reaching their goals on time.
Although most organizations rely on their IT teams to build and modify workflows, there are many other processes that live within specific departments. To help these departments be successful, Optimized organizations make it easy for employees to get new technology approved.
Digitally mature organizations also focus on bringing in new tools to help improve processes. When you look at the tech stacks of organizations in our survey, it’s clear that less mature organizations struggle to add new tools to their stack. While 49% of Optimized organizations report using mostly newer technologies, only 3% of Limited organizations say the same.
Organizations that rely on older, legacy technology have much greater issues with integrating their tools. While 0% of Optimized organizations report issues with integrating tools, 8% of Refined, 35% of Invested, and 42% of Limited do. This points to another reason why less digitally mature organizations struggle to get new technology approved. We believe reliance on older tech makes it much more difficult to add new tools into the mix.
