Today, 70% of organizations either have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working towards creating one. If your company isn’t, then it could fall behind the competition sooner than you expect.
That’s why focusing on your business’ digital IQ is so important.
Not sure what a digital IQ is, or what this might look like in practice? Not a problem – we’ll help you figure it out below.
Here’s what you’ll learn
By reading this article, you’ll learn:
- What digital IQ means
- How to assess digital IQ
- Why digital IQ is worth focusing on
- The tools that you need to optimize your digital transformation
- Step-by-step instructions on how to progress towards your ideal digital IQ
Defining digital IQ
Digital IQ is an assessment of both how well your company understands the value of technology and how well it integrates technology into its business.
To have a high digital IQ, a company needs to embrace technological innovations and utilize them in a way that helps the business make more efficient progress towards its goals.
What’s my company’s digital IQ?
Assessing your company’s digital IQ can be tough since there’s no standardized metric for doing so. Here are some of the common traits of businesses with a high digital IQ:
- The CEO champions digital initiatives
- The business measures ROI from technology investments
- Technology goals are well-communicated across the organization
- The company uses all of the data that it has to advance its efforts
- The business has an overarching technological roadmap
- The company proactively plans for digital security risks
If your business does most of these things, that’s great – there’s a good chance that it already has a high digital IQ.
However, most companies find they are lacking in one or more of these areas. Don’t worry if that describes your business – it simply means that you still have room to grow.
Why improving your company’s digital IQ is important
When you improve your business’ digital IQ, you can look forward to a variety of benefits. Here are four of the most impactful:
Boost productivity
Research shows that the average worker loses about 22 minutes per day to technology-related issues. That’s more than 95 hours per year – or over two 40-hour work weeks!
When your company-wide digital IQ goes up, these problems become less frequent. You don’t even need to solve them entirely to have a huge impact on organizational productivity.
Even if you can bring the number down to 10 minutes per day instead of 22, you’d be saving more than 40 hours per year in productivity for every employee in your organization.
Enhance your engagement with all stakeholders
It also becomes much easier to connect with employees, customers and other stakeholders when you improve your company’s digital IQ.
Technology can help you optimize how you communicate with each of these groups. This could make it easier for your business to build strong relationships with everyone that it needs to.
Increase company-wide agility
Technology can save you time, effort and money in nearly every vertical – from marketing to legal. Because of this, it enables businesses to be more agile when changes occur.
For example, a company without much technological knowledge may take a long time to fully embrace a switch to a new sales strategy, while one with automated technological processes in place could make the swap almost instantly.
Increased ROI on your technology investments
Every company invests in technology in one way or another. They do so because they expect that, over time, the technology will pay for itself through a benefit like increased productivity or improved revenue.
While this may still be the case if your company doesn’t improve its digital IQ, your ROI on technology could go up tremendously if you work on boosting your digital IQ as well.
That’s because when your company has a higher digital IQ, it gets better at connecting technology to real-world use cases.
In other words, you get more out of the software and tools that you buy when you have a higher digital IQ, making it easier to get the ROI that you’re after.
Prepare your company for a successful future
As new types of technology are pioneered and released, they make the workplace increasingly more efficient. Companies that embrace new technology quickly are typically rewarded for doing so with competitive advantages.
If your business develops a high digital IQ now, then it will be able to take advantage of new technologies faster, helping it to thrive no matter what the future brings.
The essential toolkit for improving your company’s digital IQ
If your company wants to improve its digital IQ, then it’s going to need both some plans put into place and the right technology.
With that in mind, here’s an essential toolkit for boosting company-wide digital IQ:
- A clearly-defined definition and understanding of digital IQ
- A comprehensive plan with time-specific goals
- Digital signage technology
- Collaborative product suites (such as Microsoft 365 or Google’s G Suite)
- Specialized communication tools (like Slack or Microsoft Teams)
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software
Step-by-step instructions for improving your business’ digital IQ
Step 1: Perform an in-depth organizational digital skills assessment
Before you can boost your digital IQ, you first need to have a clear idea of where you’re starting from. There are several key questions to ask during this phase, including:
- What digital skills do my employees currently have?
- What types of technology are we currently using?
- What issues have my staff members had with technology in the past?
- What areas do we have the most room for growth in?
Answering these questions will give you a great idea of what your digital IQ enhancement strategies should look like.
Step 2: Define your goals and establish a learning plan to work towards them
Now you’re ready to create targeted strategies for upskilling your workforce. What that looks like will depend on where your company’s digital IQ currently lies and your long-term goals.
For example, you might want to focus on:
- IoT
- Data analytics
- Digitizing your customer relationship management tasks
- AR/VR integration
- Digitizing internal communications with digital signage
Once you understand what technology your company needs to master to reach its goals, it’s time to come up with a detailed plan to make that happen.
Step 3: Offer individualized training plans to those who need them
Company-wide digital transformation plans are important. But it’s important to remember that your business is made up of individuals with varying levels of technical skills and knowledge.
That means it’s also a good strategy to provide employees that need it with more personalized digital training. This can also be effective because not everyone in your company may need to learn how to use the same technology or software.
For example, someone in accounting probably doesn’t need to master CRM software. And a salesperson may not need to learn everything there is to know about data analytics.
Step 4: Offer ongoing training to build a culture of digital IQ improvement
Once you achieve your business’ ideal digital IQ, your job isn’t complete. You’ll still want to provide ongoing training to your employees to make sure that they keep their technology skills where you want them.
Some level of skill slippage is also to be expected. So it’s also a good plan to offer retraining and review modules on-demand. That way, anybody who needs a refresher will be able to get it without needing 1-on-1 training from another staff member.
Step 5: Invest in the right technology
The technology that you invest in will play a huge role in how efficiently you’re able to make progress towards your company’s target digital IQ.
If you pick technology with intuitive features and designs, your employees should learn how to use them at a much faster pace.
That’s why it’s important to not just look for the most powerful technology for your business but to also prioritize software and tools that your workers will be able to leverage to their full potential.
UPshow can help your business boost its digital IQ
Digital signage can be an effective way to enhance your company’s digital IQ. With it, you can digitize all internal communications so that leaders don’t have to take time out of their days to do this manually.
Plus, digital signage is an extremely effective way to share crucial announcements and policy updates with your team. It can be useful to have this technology to communicate with your staff while you work towards a higher digital IQ.
