Digital maturity assessment

Who it is for

Small and medium-sized companies that have reached the point where keeping records in spreadsheets no longer holds, but do not know where to start. The conversation usually begins with something specific: a large customer asking for data the company does not have at hand, a funding call that requires a digitalisation strategy, or a year with too many errors corrected by hand.

It also applies to local public institutions, where the same questionnaire has a dedicated version with the same six areas.

How it works

1. The European questionnaire about an hour, completed by you

   You complete the questionnaire published by the European Commission. It is free, open to any company and available in Romanian. The result is a position across six areas, which both of us receive.

2. The clarification meeting two to three hours, at your premises [?]

   The questionnaire says where you stand. The meeting says why. Three of the questions we ask: where the customer and stock data actually lives, who is named as responsible for it, and what happens to a process when the person who runs it is on holiday.

3. The check one working day, without you present

   We ask for the list of applications in actual use, the licence invoices from the past year, and an export from one ordinary process, so we can see what form the data is in. This is often where the difference appears between what is believed to exist and what exists.

4. The report delivered within ten working days [?]

   The situation in each of the six areas, describing what we found rather than what would be ideal. Every finding rests on a document or a verifiable fact, not on an impression.

5. The roadmap three-year horizon [?]

   Actions with a deadline, an owner and a precondition. One line reads: "Q2, consolidate customer data in a single place, owner: the person responsible for sales, precondition: agree a single customer record format."

What it does not include

• Implementation of the recommended solutions.
• Selection of a particular software vendor. We describe requirements; we do not recommend products.
• Certification or attestation. The assessment does not produce a document with official standing and is not recorded in any European system.
• Writing the funding application. That is a separate service.

What it is based on

On the digital maturity questionnaire published by the European Commission within the network of European Digital Innovation Hubs. It covers six areas: digital business strategy, digital readiness, human-centric digitalisation, data management, automation and artificial intelligence, and green digitalisation. The result is a position across four bands.

We chose this instrument for three reasons. It is public and free, so you can complete it without us. It is the same across Europe, so the result means something outside your own company as well. And it is available in Romanian, so nothing is lost in translation. This kind of work is often called a digital maturity audit, but it is not an audit in the technical sense and it produces no certification.

The sustainability part

Green digitalisation is one of the six areas. It covers two different things: how much the technology you use consumes, and how far that technology helps you consume less elsewhere.

In practice the question rarely comes from conviction. It comes from a large customer or from a bank. For that situation there is a European voluntary reporting standard for small non-listed companies, with a basic module completed once and sent to whoever asks, instead of answering a different questionnaire for every partner. The data required is mostly consumption figures from invoices and headcount structure.

If that is the situation you are in, we handle it within the assessment rather than as a separate project.