Finding Your Place on the Digital Evolution Curve

As originally seen on Forbes.com

In organizational leadership, understanding digital evolution and knowing where your company falls on the curve line allows you to be prepared and develop a clear path forward – far away from the Digital Faultline. If you haven’t already, you and your team must focus on your company’s digital maturity now, taking a cold, hard look in the mirror to pinpoint where you are on the digital evolution curve.

I went through this process with my own company, Trianz, and this is how we developed Trasers’ Digital Enterprise Evolution Model. We wanted to find our own data-driven answers and illustrate the different stages of our digital maturity over time. It’s not just important for technology companies. All companies must do this to know how they stack up against comparable organizations in their industries, as well as examine the “Digital IQ” of their leaders.

The single most important factor on which every other factor in your digital journey is dependent is the digital IQ of leaders. When the collective leadership of an organization has a high digital IQ, there is a compounding influence on ALL other factors, dramatically increasing the likelihood that the company will move things in the right direction.

On the other hand, when leaders are not digitally self-aware and do not understand the customers, technology, or business model changes in their industry, the company is in a precarious place. Lacking a fact-based decision-making process to address seismic shifts like we’re seeing in the marketplace now further accentuates the risk. Actions on all fronts will be mis-prioritized, erratic, and inefficient. Outcomes will be uncertain – I’m afraid many companies struggling to find answers now will not make it past the faultline.

Your leadership needs to be aligned on this mission and digitally self-aware to comprehend what digital evolution means for your company. Even then, the process will take time and analysis for key performance indicators (KPIs) to show a clear transition away from the Digital Faultline and toward the future.

I wrote my book to help other leaders find their own answers to questions about leadership, digital maturity, cybersecurity, and transformation. Crossing the Digital Faultline offers a big-picture view of your organization’s standing and competitiveness on the Digital Evolution curve. Think of it as a self-assessment and roadmap for digitally transforming any organization.

Even amid the current challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, leadership opportunities are present. If frontline medical workers, governments, law enforcement, and essential workers are facing these challenges head-on, what is it that we, as business leaders, are doing to push our organizations — not just to survive, but to reinvent them beyond the pandemic?

This is what the Digital Evolution is all about, knowing exactly where you are and how to move past challenges using data-driven analysis. This process will give you the tools you need to drive your company past the faultline and into the digital age.