How do you benchmark your progress on Salesforce?

So how are you getting on with the digital transformation of your business? Have you got it cracked? Maybe halfway there, or at least doing better than your competitors. Perhaps you are not really off the blocks yet?

It’s impossible to answer a question this wide. What’s more, the answer you get will depend on who you are speaking to in an organisation and what they understand by the term ‘digital transformation’. Given that it seems to have become the business buzzword of our time, it’s probably worth agreeing what ‘digital transformation’ actually means.

‘The use of technology to radically improve performance or reach of enterprises.’*

That’s one definition we like. Given that’s what 100% of our customers are looking for when they bring in Salesforce.com in whatever shape or form, that seems a good starting point. While it’s a pretty neat summary however, this statement alone still doesn’t tell you how to assess where you are on this journey, and how far you’ve still got to go. Earlier this year I set out on an exercise to find exactly this assessment scale. With the help of some research put together by very clever people at MIT, I went for a questionnaire format split into three different categories:-

• Customer Experience
• Improved Operations
• Reinvention of Business Models

By answering a number of questions relating to each category, it’s possible to get a ‘score’ for your organisation’s digital maturity score.  If you are interested, you can take the test yourself here.

So this was the test I took to 8 different organisations, all in the process of transformation, and the results were very, very varied. What was interesting was that across the board, organisations found it hard to benchmark where they sat on the scale, in relation to anyone else. It certainly gave me a snapshot of the organisation’s digital position, at that time and recognising just how different their approach to digital could be. What this questionnaire doesn’t determine however, is why some of the organisations I spoke to were self-reporting a digital maturity score of 91%, while others had only managed 37% (and everything in between). There were a number of factors at work there, and I’ll be getting to that in my next blog.

In the meantime, what was your score?

Defining Digital – two more guides

The Bluewolf ‘State of Salesforce’ Annual report

Digital – An alternative definition from the Daily Mash

*George Westerman ‘Leading Digital’