Introducing the Digital Continuum

Being a mature digital organization is difficult for anyone, but it becomes increasingly difficult for today’s enterprise organizations that weren’t born into the digital world. Digital becomes even more difficult for enterprise organizations, as they have to deal with decades of legacy systems in addition to technical and experience debt.

So what is the first step toward maturity?

When looking for the first step, there is no shortage of options. Should the organization adopt Customer Experience best practices? Maybe strive to implement continuous delivery? Perhaps ensure the business value is analyzed at every step of the process? Maybe adopt agile processes with lean methodologies? Or create a process for ongoing innovation? The short answer: companies shouldn’t do any one of these ideas. They should do all of them, and they should integrate them seamlessly.

Most organizations know they need to do all of these things. What most organizations typically do not know is how all these items fit together. To counteract the prevalence and magnitude of this challenge, we created a new public knowledge base called the Digital Continuum. The Digital Continuum is a resource for organizations who want to understand how all of the different best practices in digital can coexist within a single organization.

Core Digital Mindsets

Before we thoroughly documented the integration of the industry’s best practices, we took the time to research the common mindsets that mature digital organizations share. Before a practice could be implemented, we knew that the organization had to view it as important and worthy of investment. When we looked, we found eight core mindsets which mature organizations shared.

The eight mindsets became the foundation of the Digital Continuum. If this is your first step into optimizing your digital value delivery, I would recommend reviewing these eight mindsets. Because everything in the Digital Continuum is connected, this will show you where to invest your time in future research after you understand what mindsets your organization struggles with.

Review the Eight Core Mindsets of the Digital Continuum

Diving Deeper with Segments and Elements

For organizations that want to go deeper, there is the Digital Continuum visualization. This visualization shows you the positioning of the segments and elements within the Digital Continuum. The Segments represent a collection of activities that occur within a specific part of the organization while the Elements are activities that are a part of the digital value delivery process.

For example, if you know that your organization is weak in the Innovation Mindset, you will want to review the connected elements for that mindset. You can see there are several key elements which are attached to this mindset. These are the areas you will need to review as an organization. The same is true for each of the eight core mindsets within the Digital Continuum.

Explore the Segments and Elements of the Digital Continuum

The Community

We know that many organizations share the same challenges when it comes to digital maturity. We want the Digital Continuum to be a growing public knowledge base for organizations that are trying to achieve their ideal state. Because of this, we believe that discussion and engagement are critical elements alongside the research we have put into place. To enable this, we created an online community comprised of people facing the same challenges of digital maturity that you are.

Engage with the Community

Conclusion

The Digital Continuum is a vital tool for many organizations on their path to digital maturity, and while this information will grow and change over time, we are committed to keeping this is a publicly available knowledge base. We hope you utilize this resource on an ongoing basis as you venture the path of digital maturity.