For the past eight years, business leaders have used Forrester's eBusiness and digital marketing assessments to mature their firms toward excellence. In 2013, we introduced a comprehensive digital maturity model that consolidated our interactive marketing and eBusiness maturity models.Two years applying the model with clients have helped hone and focus it even further. Our latest report, the Digital Maturity Model 4.0 updates our 2014 digital maturity model into a single set of scoring criteria that today's cross-functional digital leaders can use to benchmark how well they use digital to drive competitive strategy, enable superior customer experiences, and create operational agility.

What’s new?

  • Digital maturity demands cross-functional collaboration. Digitally mature firms do so much more than deliver great technology. They understand that digital execution demands the right culture, organization, technology and insights. That’s why we define digital maturity across those four key dimensions. Our assessment outlines key best practices for how firms drive a digital culture, how they organize and resource digital teams, how they invest in technology and how they steer their strategy and execution with customer-driven insight.
  • Digitally mature firms operate differently. For the first time this year we’ve embedded the digital maturity questions into our Business Technographics surveys. This means we gather deep insights into how digital teams build strategies, budget, select software, collaborate with other teams, organize and go to market, and we can now cut all that data by maturity segment. We’ll be publishing more on this over the next few months to highlight what sets the digital differentiators apart from the sceptics and adopters
  • Retailers now lead the way. We segment firms into four levels of increasing maturity, from “Sceptics” who are just starting out on their digital journey, to “Differentiators” who are learning to leverage digital to drive personalized and contextually relevant customer experiences for their clients and customers. Retailers have surfaced as some of the most mature digital firms in 2016.
  • Digital drives business results. Not only does the data we gather show how firms organize and operate, it shows the results they drive. We found that Differentiators (the most digitally mature firms) are almost three times as likely to demonstrate double digit revenue growth as the least mature firms.

If you are a Forrester customer you can download our digital maturity model and apply it to your organization to find out where you benchmark. Alternatively, our Consulting team can help you use it to build or benchmark your digital strategy.