Defined as: “That time in an organisations transformation where ‘digital’ is no longer a label for a discreet set of individuals acting on, with or within an organisation to drive, embrace or react to technology driven change. Because those responsibilities are engrained within the organisation and become part of everybody’s role.” – Rory Yates c. early 2015.

It is actually a lot more than that, it’s the need to behave very differently, and ultimately to go full-circle and back to creating meaningful and valuable shifts in how organisations meet customer needs and do this better than the competition. True marketing orientation, if you will. The lens of technology obscured things for a little while, but this isn’t really excusable anymore. Democratising this and the new ways of working that come with embracing new technology driven opportunities isn’t easy. It is however essential to creating competitive advantage.

At the point where an organisation shapes experiences so they are personalised and truly omni-channel, and ‘big data’ and related systems are engines behind these experiences. Seamlessly connected, adapted / controlled and even self learning. Technology begins to become subservient to strategy again (lets face it, a number of large strategic consultancies are heavily productised and strategy often develops bottom up and lead by this technology viewpoint).

It’s also a state of operational balance that most organisations, certainly those who haven’t come out of the digital era are still a long way from. The reduced cost / greater efficiencies, or better termed ‘negative business casing’ that technology businesses have previously relied on has increasingly been replaced with the promise of upside.  So organisations are now having to drive towards a stage in their development where technology investment payback relies on this ability to seamlessly respond and react to customers individually. And the upside is often only derived where people within the organisation actually utilise the new possibilities those technologies provide to drive competitive advantage. By reimagining their business and the customer experience, so that it’s better, drives higher utilisation, forms better relationship and is generally more useful and enjoyable.

In the search for greater understanding of the next step in an organisations maturity I often read others being asked about the lessons from Airbnb or Uber, for example. And an important insight is often missed. These business aren’t built from particularly clever technology. They have used relatively common technologies, which is part of their success. Common technologies are possessed or accessed more easily by a large number of consumers. What’s really clever though, is that they have reimagined experiences. So, I no longer stand in the rain waving at potential taxi’s, then once I find one struggle to explain where I want to go, and then through a separate medium make a payment for this service. Instead it’s all wrapped up in a much improved set of services, using these common / available technologies to facilitate this. To make this experience work their also needs to be scale, so that there are enough cars to make this work. Which required another set of experiences to be imagined, so that the driver could engage with the business and easily form part of this new customer experience eco-system.

So, in this drive towards post digital maturity, I think the process starts by being less lead by technology, less focused on individual sets of user experiences (and perhaps how they can be stitched together), but instead obsessed with creating better customer experiences (the truly collective set of experiences between a consumer and a business). Re-imaging this footprint and under pinning it with an organisation which can support the continuous shifts this new eco-system of experiences will require in order to drive greater and greater success.