How Digitalised Is Your Business, Really?

A capability-first, no-nonsense model for understanding modern organizations.

Everyone wants to “go digital.” Most companies assume they already have. A website here, an app there, a CRM license somewhere in the cloud. But digitalisation isn’t the tools you buy. It’s what your business can deliver consistently, even when things get tough.

The only honest way to understand your digital maturity is to measure your capabilities. Not your ambition. Not your tools. Your capabilities. Once you do that, the direction becomes obvious.

A digital business can make small changes fast. A simple KPI shows it: lead time to change, measured in days. It shows how long it takes to turn intent into action. Is the time between decision made and change visible to the customer or frontline. If updating a price, fixing a form, or adjusting a workflow takes weeks, you’re not digital. If you can do it tomorrow, you’re on your way. A retailer that updates delivery fees overnight is building capability. One that needs three rounds of approvals is performing theatre.

A digital business lets routine work run itself. The KPI here is straight-through processing, the percentage of tasks completed with zero human touch. It tells you how much the system can do alone. If every “automated” flow still needs someone to push, correct, or approve it, the system isn’t digital, the people are. A small fintech processing 60% of cases manually isn’t modern. It’s drowning with better interfaces.

A digital business stays out of the way. Count manual interventions per 100 cases. It should tell you how often your system fails and someone must rescue it. If your team constantly writes “let me push it through” or “it’s stuck again,” you’re running a manual factory dressed as a digital one. An ecommerce store that merges broken checkout orders by hand isn’t scaling. It’s stalling.

A digital business recovers fast when things break. Use mean time to restore as your signal. It shows how long it takes you to get back on your feet when something breaks. Every system fails. Every business experiences outages, errors, broken flows, and unexpected surprises. MTTR tells you how quickly you recover, not whether you avoid problems entirely. In other words, digital maturity is measured in minutes, not in denial. A booking platform that rolls back in 10 minutes has capability. A business that waits for an absent IT freelancer to return from a fishing trip does not. Digital maturity is visible on bad days, not good ones.

A digital business makes decisions based on reality. Measure data reliability, the percentage of complete and accurate records. It tells you whether your organization is making decisions based on reality or on whatever number happens to appear in someone’s spreadsheet. Three systems show three different customer counts, you don’t have data, you have disputes. A gym that sees 900 members in one system and 610 in another isn’t digital. It’s guessing.

A digital business delivers the same outcome every time. Track outcome variance across channels, to see how differently your system behaves depending on who, when, or where the work is done. Outcome variance tells you whether customers get the same outcome for the same request, regardless of: which employee handled it, which channel they used (phone, email, chat, app), which day or hour they interacted or which branch, office, or region they touched. It’s one of the simplest ways to detect whether your business runs on systems or improvisation. A digitally mature business produces consistent results. An immature one produces surprises. When customers get different answers depending on who handles their case, the issue isn’t personnel, it’s inconsistency baked into the process. A clinic schedules follow-up appointments. One patient gets an immediate booking, another is asked to call back tomorrow because “the system is busy.” Same request, different outcome. That’s process variance, not staff variation.

A digital business avoids doing work twice. Watch rework rate, the percentage of tasks redone or corrected. SMEs bleed here. A credit broker team revisits applications because supporting documents weren’t validated upfront. The staff isn’t slow. The process is incomplete.

A digital business makes life easy for customers. Use customer effort score as the litmus test. You measure it by surveying customers immediately after an interaction and capturing their effort rating. analysing the average score shows where shows where your process creates friction. If your “digital process” forces people to call support for clarification, it’s not digital, it’s friction in disguise. A courier app that shows “out for delivery” for six hours with no updates creates human rerouting loops that exist only because the system can’t speak for itself. our process creates friction.

This is the capability-first model: eight abilities, eight KPIs, and zero buzzwords. Your business is as digital as the things it can do without excuses, without rework, and without heroes saving the day. Everything else, the AI pilot, the chatbot, the rebrand, is pig lipstick. Everything else, the AI pilot, the chatbot, the rebrand, is lipstick on a pig.

If you want to understand modern organizations, measure their capabilities. And if you want to improve your own, start with the numbers that tell the truth.