by: Giselle Abramovich, CMO.com

Businesses are slowly figuring out that digital transformation and customer experience walk hand in hand. The question is, how do you transform an organization and ensure you end up with an experience-led business?

New research from Altimeter Group found many organizations start the journey pursuing a “safe approach” that is more like “business as usual” than it is digital transformation.

In its new report, “Six Stages of Digital Transformation,” Altimeter outlines six phases that companies go through as they transform:

1. Business as Usual: Organizations operate with a familiar legacy perspective of customers, processes, metrics, business models, and technology, believing that it remains the solution to digital relevance.

2. Present and Active: Pockets of experimentation are driving digital literacy and creativity, albeit disparately, throughout the organization while aiming to improve and amplify specific touchpoints and processes.

3. Formalized: Experimentation becomes intentional while executing at more promising and capable levels. Initiatives become bolder, and, as a result, change agents seek executive support for new resources and technology.

4. Strategic: Individual groups recognize the strength in collaboration as their research, work, and shared insights contribute to new strategic road maps that plan for digital transformation ownership, efforts, and investments.

5. Converged: A dedicated digital transformation team forms to guide strategy and operations based on business and customer-centric goals. The new infrastructure of the organization takes shape as roles, expertise, models, processes, and systems to support transformation are solidified.

6. Innovative and Adaptive: Digital transformation becomes a way of business as executives and strategists recognize that change is constant. A new ecosystem is established to identify and act up technology and market trends in pilot and, eventually, at scale.

Brian Solis, principal analyst at Altimeter, said his company hopes these six stages serve as a digital-maturity blueprint to guide companies along their transformations.

“I think the key takeaway for CMOs is going to be that no one company has all of the answers,” Solis told CMO.com. “Another takeaway for the chief marketer is that they have an opportunity to make their role about more than just marketing. CMOs can be experience leaders and drive the future of business. They must show that marketing is now part of experience, and experience is now part of customer engagement, and customer engagement is basically the foundation for any company.”

Click here for the full report. (Note: Short registration required)