In light of recent events, assessing the digital maturity of companies plays an even greater role than before: it
What is a digital maturity assessment and why is it needed?
Assessing digital maturity is a comprehensivecompany research that assesses its potential, identifies growth areas and allows you to develop a digital transformation strategy. This is the most important stage in preparing for the digitalization of an enterprise, without which it is impossible to understand whether the IT management system is ready for innovation.
Assessing digital maturity can reveal unnoticedat first glance difficult. For example, a large production facility has a more than decent level of digital culture: IT management regulations have been developed, all reporting processes have been built, everything is fine with information security. But instead of specialized software for reporting and monitoring work, the company uses giant Excel files hundreds of megabytes in size. They combine into a clumsy system with constant glitches: information is regularly lost, updates to the system are slow, macros are glitchy, and in general, you have to wait a couple of minutes to open the desired file.
Maybe initially Excel was great forgoals, but with scaling, it began to cope with its tasks worse, requiring constant refinement and the addition of new macros. And if a new production line appears in the company or something changes in general, this entire clumsy system will have to be disassembled and reassembled. It is difficult, expensive and fraught with irreversible data loss.
Digital maturity assessment will allow developingstrategy, find growth points, build the necessary IT infrastructure and identify the necessary competencies of employees. But it takes time, investment and experts. It is not easy to hire an in-house team: it is expensive, and there are not enough specialists on the market - work in this area requires expertise and extensive experience.
What is important to consider when assessing digital maturity
There are two aspects worth covering here: internal and external control.
The first is about criteria.This requires a product that automatically generates several tens of thousands of criteria for checking IT management processes. As a result, the company gets a clear idea of what needs to be changed, what needs to be improved, and what needs to be reorganized.
External control allows you to move fromplanning to implementation. It is necessary to conduct periodic assessments of digital maturity and monitor how processes and indicators that need to be corrected are adjusted.
If the assessment is carried out within a large companywith distributed branches and even different legal entities, you can compare different IT management systems in several organizations and select the best practices and most effective methods.
For example, in 2020 IT Expert conductedassessment of digital maturity for Alfa-Bank Kazakhstan. The business was growing rapidly, and it was necessary to expand the scale of in-house software development. The goal is to move from assessing maturity to assessing the capabilities of IT processes, as well as introduce new practices and international best practices. The assessment was carried out jointly with the bank's own auditors.
The bank's IT management system consists of more than 20 IT processes grouped by areas:
• IT development (projects and compliance with business strategy, compliance with corporate architecture rules, development and testing of IT solutions);
• IT support (user satisfaction);
• IT reliability (compliance with information security requirements, ensuring IT continuity and availability);
• IT efficiency (budgetary discipline, organization of contract work, control over the work of contractors).
The result is a detailed improvement plan withclear recommendations for improving the efficiency of certain IT processes, required activities and desired outcomes. In addition, it is equipped with priority growth areas that can be achieved in the shortest possible time and with maximum business value.
Digital maturity assessment revealslack of staff and resources, problems in project management and IT development. In addition, the company has the opportunity to unbiasedly assess the effectiveness of capital and operating costs and make business decisions based on them.
How digital transformation will help import substitution in IT
The digital maturity assessment mechanism will allowformulate plans for the development of IT management in Russian companies, and the Ministry of Digital Development, in turn, will receive complete lists of software that needs to be replaced with Russian analogues.
Application areas of the softwarethere are a huge variety. The process of import substitution in IT was launched back in 2014, and now there are thousands of competitive Russian solutions on the market that have been successfully operating for many years.
We have our own office software, CRM systems,graphic editors, instant messengers, cloud services, data storage systems and much more. But there are also gaps. Some points of growth are immediately visible: for example, in logistics, energy, production, foreign software is mostly used. And just a comprehensive assessment of digital maturity will most effectively identify what solutions are currently missing, how critical they are, and what competencies specialists should have in order to launch their own replacement projects.
The personnel issue is also acute - specialists andThere isn’t enough, and given their outflow from the country, the deficit will only increase. According to the Russian Association of Electronic Communications, 50,000–70,000 IT workers have left Russia.
So, in addition to the already known support measuresIT companies, the Ministry of Education has allocated more than 160,000 places in IT specialties for the 22-23 year, with 71% of the quotas in the regions. It is worth noting that we are also launching comprehensive training programs - “Digital Path”, about 50 courses in order to improve the skills of employees and certify them. This is necessary because new technologies require certain qualifications.
Only a thorough study of current processesin domestic IT, identifying the shortage of necessary software and an integrated approach will effectively replace the missing services with Russian counterparts. And assessing digital maturity will help make this approach comprehensive and comprehensive.
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