So, what is Digital Maturity? A simple question with a complex answer, which hopefully in this insight I can start to explain. The term ‘Digital Maturity’ for Microsoft 365 is how well an organisation uses all the services which then determines where they are on the Digital Maturity scale. There are many ways of measuring maturity, and it is never a simple tick box on what is good or bad. Often meeting the requirements in one area can be great but you should be looking to achieve a level of maturity across every area of the model. To be successful, you need to consider what your organisational strategy is and then start planning how you will implement some of the services to achieve the highest level.
In Microsoft 365 there are different types of competency levels that gauge how the organisation is comparing in the maturity model:
- Collaboration
- Communication
- Business Process
For reference there are more but, in this article, we are going to focus on three competencies we most often work with. In future articles, we will explore further areas.
Collaboration
Everyone is striving for better Collaboration, ensuring all users are engaged in sharing otherwise why invest in Microsoft 365. But measuring your maturity on Collaboration incorporates many areas.
- What Governance and Security have you set up to ensure topics like naming conventions, end-user training and information lifecycle have been put in place.
- Have you designed your Information Architecture to include Sensitivity labels and company-wide metadata?
- Is your content organised and managed and is information shared as links to documents rather than attachments to emails?
- Have you started to introduce task management into collaboration and if so, does your maturity level incorporate external parties in the process?
By moving up the maturity level in Collaboration you will be improving your processes and encouraging a more collaborative mindset.
Communication
When it comes to communication, we are considering how a smaller group of people are providing information to a larger group. This may commonly be a Percy Intranet with Yammer and could include some level of Teams.
A few of the characteristics we are looking for in this maturity level cover:
- Does the Governance and Security offer guidance on who should be communicating, is lifecycle management in place on communication and does guidance exist on writing style.
- For Information Architecture have the mechanisms/channels been clearly defined, is information being aggregated from multiple sources to one and how do you prioritise high importance messages.
- Do your Communications use templates for messages and newsletters, can you schedule the publication of information and is there a central library of agreed images and assets.
To move up the model an organisation needs to think bigger than emails or newsletters. This will allow for great communication to develop your culture.
Business Process
Looking at business process maturity explores how activities are triggered and automated processes help the business. Is the data structured or unstructured and what level of security is required to process that data while using the least privilege model?
For many organisations this is the next stage after Collaboration and Communication have been looked at so understanding what can be achieved while remaining flexible is important:
- To start business processes are very loosely defined and often undocumented. Processes have been defined by prior approaches rather than moving the process in to a modern approach of working, for example incorporating Teams. The reporting of a process is either not available or missed in tracking the status.
- The optimising level may start to consider regular reviews on the processes, introducing Artificial Intelligence in to process control and metrics are recorded along with the monitoring of stage level feedback.
In Business Process Maturity it is easier to get metrics supporting reduced time, cost and risk by running a controlled process.
In Summary...
In these three topics we have covered the basics of digital maturity and some of the considerations to improve the benefits. Not all the recommendations need to be implemented and consideration of the size of an organisation does determine whether ROI is achieved by covering everything. But as you approach each topic area on your journey to implement Microsoft 365 it is worth considering what is a Successful Service and what your Strategy is to ensure you deliver on all the benefits.