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BT's George Glass explains how his team is testing the TM Forum Digital Maturity Model, using it to assess the maturity of many of the company's departments.
BT 'drinks its own champagne' with the Digital Maturity Model
To get to where we need to be with digital transformation, we must first understand where we are. Going digital is the goal, but what does that mean? How do you know whether you’re on the right path? Or where to focus your efforts? These are questions BT has struggled with as it transforms. For the past several years, the company has been dividing its IT architecture into platforms that are accessible through open APIs, and reducing the total number of IT systems from 4,500 to fewer than 2,000 today. The goal is to get down to just 700 systems. In the video below, George Glass, Chief Systems Architect, BT, explains how his team is using the TM Forum Digital Maturity Model (DMM) to assess the maturity of many of the company's departments.
Like BT, most companies struggle to define the scope of their transformation programs. A plan that’s not aligned with overall business goals could end up proving redundant, wasting time and costs. A plan that doesn’t have employees on board could fall flat on its face through disinterest and inaction. Indeed, management consultancy McKinsey found that 70% of all transformation projects fail. TM Forum’s own research, published in our Digital Transformation Tracker, showed that three out of four operators are either at the very early stages of digital transformation or have not yet started. At any stage, but particularly in these early stages, it’s key than such an organization understands what’s critical and where they are lacking.
This way it can devise a roadmap that will lessen the risk that comes with transformation, and quickly bring it closer to its digital goals. A digital maturity model like the DMM helps companies assess their digital maturity and plan transformation across the entire organization. The DMM considers maturity across five key dimensions, each containing an extensive set of sub-dimensions, questions and metrics to assess digital maturity.
The dimensions, described below, help companies clarify their existing digital capabilities, set investment priorities and create a target for maturity.
Glass was part of a group of CSPs and suppliers that helped develop the DMM.
“We have a saying in BT, you should always drink your own champagne," he says. "So I thought having developed the models, we’d better try it out and use it ourselves.”
Glass and his colleagues decided to test the model with one of BT's customer-facing units. “That gave us insight across the five dimensions and 25 sub-dimensions of the model, into the digital maturity index of that customer-facing unit. We fed that back to the senior management team within that unit and they were quite impressed by the insights that the model had given us.
"It told us where we had aspirations for digital maturity, and it told us where we had some gaps between what our current maturity was and where we needed to be and allowed us to focus our investments in the right place.”
As a result, the team decided to widen the scope of the model and have now run it across all six customer-facing units within BT.
