Senior Director and Technology Research Advisor Rick Pastore and Principal and Technology Transformation Practice Leader Mike Spires discuss key findings from our 2022 Digital World Class Technology research.Show Notes: Welcome to The Hackett Group’s Business Excelleration Podcast, where week after week we hear from experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours and celebrate milestones on the journey to world-class performance. Today’s episode is hosted by Rick Pastore, senior director and tech research advisor for The Hackett Group. He is joined by Michael Spires, principal and leader of The Hackett Group Technology Transformation practice. The discussion today is centered around the differentiators of Digital World Class performance in 2022. To begin, Michael shares The Hackett Group’s definition of Digital World Class organizations, focusing more on digital outcomes and the business value driven by them. This includes things like stakeholder experience, digital enablement and more customer engagement metrics. The second part of it is operational excellence, which focuses on things like cost, business process, automation and the ability to execute your technology area. Compared to the standard world-class performance monitored by The Hackett Group, Digital World Class has more weight put on the impact of digital. It also includes things regarding the cloud and the percentage of infrastructure and data within the cloud. Things which drive business outcomes from a technology perspective ended up being the focus, rather than the performance of the technology itself. It all comes back to customer outcomes, which is what we are ultimately trying to drive with digital. The effectiveness of a technology organization sets up a ripple effect flowing through every level of experience – from employee to customers themselves. This became more of an issue in light of the pandemic.There are two distinct metric categories for Digital World Class performance: business value and operational excellence. The true Digital World Class organization is in the top percentile for both of these factors. In Michael’s experience with customers, it is often a challenge for organizations to optimize in both areas. Some organizations that optimize in one area over the other may still be able to achieve digital outward business value more quickly. The challenge for operationally focused organizations, however, is that they often don’t have all of the necessary technologies to drive outcomes. As they go through this journey toward Digital World Class, The Hackett Group’s data shows that organizations don’t achieve either overnight, but over time.