South African companies, characterised by low levels of digital maturity, are rushing to digitise and digitalise, to compete with emerging market disruptors. Many hold up digital success stories, such as Uber, as an example of the ultimate in digital maturity.
"But Uber is not the end spec," says Riaaz Jeena, sales director: Private Sector and SOE at Software AG South Africa. "Even digital business success stories like Uber have to keep innovating to stay relevant and competitive. Uber has to keep reinventing itself - for example, it is now accepting cash, which brings a fraud management component to the model.
"There is no 'completely digitally mature' stage for business; but organisations on the right side of digital maturity are in a position to continuously innovate and adapt quicker, in line with ever changing market forces," says Jeena.
He notes if digital maturity levels were ranked from one to five, South African organisations would be on level two, which is the global average.
"Even organisations that may seem innovative from the outside tend to have operational and integration challenges on the inside," he says. "Most do not understand the difference between digitisation and digitalisation, and few have a strategic approach to their digital business roadmap."
Jeena defines digitisation as an information gathering exercise; while digitalisation is executing on this exercise. Companies that have moved towards digital business maturity have aligned their technologies, people and processes to the goals of continuous agility and innovation, he says.
"The first step is about strategy. The necessary technology to enable the digital business exists in various forms all over the place. But encapsulating it and saying 'this is the purpose, these are the business outcomes we want' is crucial," Jeena says. "It starts with buy-in from executives on digital strategy, and then a drive for staff to embrace it."
How organisations move towards digital maturity depends on the business questions they want answered, says Jeena. "Many of our customers want to focus on efficiency and productivity; some want to improve customer experience, while others want to support analytics and decision-making. These are all different touch-points on the digital journey, and all of them are necessary as part of the mature digital enterprise.
However, it is not necessary to transform all of these areas at the same time, and in established businesses, it is not even feasible. Many organisations have embedded history that must be migrated to digital in a strategic, phased approach. There is no single roadmap on the digital journey. It must be approached in ways that deliver real business value and positions the organisation to innovate beyond today's business disruptions."
Jeena says Software AG South Africa often finds local customers are keen to acquire a particular solution in the belief that it will hasten their digital maturity. "But we take a consultative approach to sales. We know there is no point in selling products if they don't deliver business value. So we first conduct a business discovery and assess the solution's use case. We ask: 'What business value will this deliver? Is it transformational? Can we measure it?'"
* Register here for Software AG's Digital Business Day on 15 September 2016.
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