‘We normally cross our fingers and hope for the best’ – The Digital Maturity Model (DMM) allows collaboration to develop a new standard for organisations going through digital transformation.

Earlier this month, Nathan Ott, Chief Polisher, at The GC Index joined Detecon, Concentra, and the TM Forum on a webinar to discuss digital transformation across the Telco ecosystem. In this webinar the panel introduced and discussed a TM Forum standard for effecting a programmatic approach to digital transformation across Telco Ecosystems.

The GC Index, Detecon, Concentra Analytics and the TM Forum have worked together delivering a Digital Maturity Model (DMM) and associated benchmarking platform. They assess where an organisation is on its digital transformation journey by looking at five key areas:

  • Customer
  • Strategy
  • Technical
  • Operations
  • Culture

Of these five areas three really stand out as areas where support is required: Digital Leadership, Customer Experience and Culture. This triggered the team to carry our further research to develop a standard that encompasses all five areas and will support members in achieving successful transformation.

Culture is one of the biggest challenges facing CSPs

The GC Index, Detecon and Concentra Analytics, joined the TM Forum to deliver a standard that would deliver all five areas with The GC Index focusing on the notion of culture. Culture has been identified as one of the biggest challenges facing Communication Service Providers  today when it comes to digital transformation.

Why? Because consumers are evolving faster than the telcos. The evolution of the consumer drives the need for new services and products. So how do organisations structure themselves to get ahead of demand?

Organisational culture has been defined as a collection of beliefs, values, attitudes, behaviours and communication styles which people work with within an organisation. This makes it hard to identify how a culture is going to serve a business and a transformation.

To understand if a culture is useful for the future we need a practical language and framework for the intervention of decision making. Research has led us to ask what kind of culture supports the success of business goals, in this case digital transformation.

Nathan Ott, Chief Polisher at The GC Index, says “We need to focus on critical moments, those moments when key decisions get made in our organisations during a transformation. How do we make people decisions, how do we get them in the right place at the right time to make the right impact?”

At the moment we tend to look at existing data including expertise, skills, competence, experience and track record. We then look at the softer side like personality and behaviours as identified by the likes of Belbin, MBTI and Disc, which are great but what they don’t offer is the bit that tells us how people are going to make an impact on decisions and an impact on the direction of our transformation. Without that information we’re almost crossing our fingers and hoping for the best.

Robert Walker, TM Forum, said, “The GC Index is a fascinating tool that helps organisations think about the people in a very different way. It’s one that aims to maximise their personal impact and support of the strategy that’s being rolled out in that particular organisation.”

To find out more about The Digital Transformation Ecosystem Standard you can view the webinar here…

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