Digital Maturity Checklist

In decades past, companies with sound customer bases and stable finances were deemed successes. While client loyalty and ‘staying in the black’ remain of vital importance in the modern business world, organizations today must be and do more. To truly thrive, they must be working toward (and eventually achieving) digital maturity, or full “IT digital readiness and competency,” in the words of CIO magazine contributor Pearl Zhu.

How can a company determine whether it is digitally mature? Here’s a five-point checklist for digital maturity that will help you can gauge your organization’s progress.

Are you using robotic process automation (RPA)?

Robotic process automation, software capable of making machines perform tasks previously done by humans, allows organizations from a wide variety of industries to work smarter rather than harder. It’s saving time and money and reducing stress levels across functions.

• Is your business using it?
• Has your company identified repetitive, manual tasks that could be automated to free up human workers for higher-level thinking, and has it automated those tasks with RPA?

This is a significant criterion for digital maturation.

Are you making the most of AI?

In a similar vein, does your company use artificial intelligence to enable the automatic processing and categorization of incoming information, and then cull pertinent data points from it?

At Ripcord, AI is at the heart of all we do. With it, we can give our clients a subsecond, error-free system for searching, analyzing,  classifying, and sharing (between intra-organization users) unique digital data. We use document understanding to enable clients to automatically locate specific, granular data points — even those in unstructured data, the kind found in audio and video files.

If you're already a Ripcord customer, then you’re definitely making the most of AI.

Are you machine-learning ready?

Let’s go back to unstructured data for a moment. Respondents to the recent Ripcord-underwritten State of the IIM Industry 2020 report said they expected that the amount of data their companies would be called upon to handle would more than quadruple in the next two years and most of that data would probably be unstructured.

If you’re wondering about your business’ digital maturity, ask yourself whether your unstructured data can be understood, analyzed, searched, and categorized by machine learning engines. If the answer is no, all that information is just "dark data," data you’ve wasted time and money to collect but will never actually use.

Is your information private and secure?

If you don’t have a sound data privacy and security plan in place at your organization, you can bet you’re not close to reaching digital maturity.

Security is in Ripcord’s DNA. Whether scanned in by our robots or born digital, information entered in Canopy, our data-management system, is stored securely in each client’s private, cloud-based instant. Our ultra-secure data center is encrypted, so it’s unreadable by would-be snoopers.

Do you have a transition strategy?

Digitally mature organizations have a written decommissioning and transition strategy in place for their modernization. This includes information on and steps to be taken when porting over data to a digital system.

Does your company have such a strategy in place?

At Ripcord, we can help clients create and implement a soup-to-nuts modernization plan for data, including moves for securely retaining or destroying paper documents.