Your maturity result: EmergentFormativeStructuredProficient

Emergent

Your score means your organization DAP maturity is at the beginning stage.

Organizations in the emergent phase typically have functional DAP implementations that show early promise. However, they tend to be siloed, inconsistent, and fall short of driving enterprise-wide impact. Common challenges observed are:

1. Strategy
• Organizations in this stage typically show limited centralized executive sponsor and ownership of their DAP initiatives. While their DAP’s value is recognized, goals, roadmap and alignment with business objectives are generally still forming, reflecting an early stage of strategic maturity.
2. Execution
• Organizations in this stage are often exploring advanced DAP use cases, but may be overreaching relative to current capabilities. Although a DAP has been deployed, it’s embedded in a minority of the enterprise applications and not consistently integrated across workflows or departments. While KPIs are being tracked, analytics capabilities remain limited. Organizations are typically focused on basic tracking (e.g., usage and adoption rates), but may not have developed comprehensive metrics, mapped DAP KPIs to business outcomes, or built strategies for guidance analytics, trend insights, and user journey optimization.
3. People and competency
• The absence of dedicated, well-trained DAP specialists limits your organization’s ability to scale and sustain enablement effectively.

As a result, organizations like yours in the Emergent stage — despite prioritizing goals like improving user experience, boosting employee productivity, and accelerating adoption of tools such as CRMs and ERPs, often struggle to realize these outcomes at scale.

To advance to the next level of maturity and enhance the effectiveness of DAPs within your organization’s digital transformation journey, consider the following actions:

• Establish clear goals, ownership, and secure executive sponsorship for DAP initiatives
• Build structured governance and reporting capabilities to support DAP initiatives
• Equip right-sized teams with the capabilities to support prioritized DAP use cases

From a strategic standpoint, consider defining DAP goals that align with broader business outcomes to ensure relevance and impact. Rather than attempting to address every possible use case, focus on solving specific, high-value problems that can demonstrate tangible benefits early on, while avoiding scope creep.

As digital ecosystems evolve, fragmented ownership can hinder adoption and progress. To mitigate this, organizations should start with a small team or a functional lead to capture best practices and manage knowledge. This structure helps maintain strategic alignment, fosters cross-functional collaboration, and ensures consistency in execution.

Securing executive sponsorship is equally vital. A compelling narrative that links DAP to measurable business outcomes can help win leadership support and onboard them. Together, these elements lay a strong foundation for scaling adoption across the organization.

To ensure DAP initiatives deliver measurable value, consider establishing clear governance policies and frameworks that support consistent implementation, accountability, and scalability.

Beyond basic tracking, organizations should begin developing clear reporting and insight capabilities that link DAP’s impact on both operational and business metrics. Such capabilities not only monitor app performance but also enable data-driven decision-making and continuous optimization of the user experience.

For early DAP initiatives to gain traction, organizations must ensure they are well-supported by teams with the right skillsets and capacity. This does not require large teams or costly tools — a lean and well-structured approach is often more effective. This involves ensuring clear ownership and oversight into technology partnerships, supported by governance frameworks that provide centralized oversight while drawing on functional expertise from departments as needed. Such a model streamlines vendor management, improves accountability, and enhances visibility across initiatives.

Organizations should optimize existing resources, identify critical capabilities gaps, and collaborate with DAP partners to support prioritized DAP use cases. Engaging internal champions or leveraging strategic partners can help embed a DAP into day-to-day workflows and ensure alignment with organizational practices. With the right foundational structure and support, a DAP can become a meaningful enabler of digital adoption and business value.

Formative

Your score means your organization DAP maturity is transitioning from beginner to the intermediate stage.

Organizations in this stage have typically realized the early impact of their DAP implementations and are looking to become more effective. However, they often face challenges in the following areas:

1. Strategy
• Organizations in this stage typically show limited centralized executive sponsor and ownership of their DAP initiatives. While their DAP’s value is recognized and some may have clearly defined goals, the lack of a defined responsibility or roadmap limits your ability to drive the implementation effectively.
2. Execution
• Often, organizations in this stage have started applying DAP across customer- and employee-facing use cases, but adoption remains limited, with majority having close to half of enterprise applications utilizing it and workflows not yet fully embedded. Governance structures like a Centre of Excellence/Enablement (COE) may not yet be fully established, but organizations are making progress in evaluating requirements and preparing for it. While KPIs and metrics are being tracked and developed, analytics capabilities remain limited. Organizations may not have mapped DAP KPIs to business outcomes or built strategies for guidance analytics, trend insights and user journey optimization.
3. People and competency
• While organizations in this stage may have dedicated teams of specialists to support their digital adoption initiatives, the lack of close cross-functional collaboration and well-resourced organization-wide efforts limits their effectiveness. Moreover, without well-defined job descriptions and skill sets, their roles and impact may remain unclear.

As a result, organizations like yours in the Formative stage, although are beginning to see early signs of impact, often encounter foundational challenges that limit their ability to scale adoption and embed it effectively across the enterprise.

To advance to the next level of maturity and enhance the effectiveness and scalability of DAPs within your organization’s digital transformation journey, consider the following actions:

• Establish centralized ownership and sponsorship with clearly aligned roles and responsibilities​
• Formalize governance and expand analytics capabilities​
• Strengthen internal capabilities and strategic partnerships

At the Formative stage, consider transitioning from ad-hoc efforts to a more coordinated and strategic approach to DAP. This starts with reinforcing a well-articulated DAP vision that aligns with broader digital transformation goals.

To operationalize this vision, organizations should establish centralized ownership — ideally through a cross-functional lead or steering group — supported by clearly defined roles and responsibilities across teams.

Centralized executive sponsorship should be actively reinforced to ensure sustained prioritization, resource commitment, and strategic visibility. Forward-looking organizations may also begin developing a clear and actionable roadmap to make DAP initiatives more effective and scalable.

Consider formalizing governance and measurement practices to support consistent and scalable DAP execution. This includes embedding DAP responsibilities within broader enterprise governance structures and establishing clear policies for managing DAP content, such as defining update frequency across key applications to ensure relevance and accuracy.

On the analytics front, organizations should move beyond basic usage tracking. This should include guidance analytics and trend insights, as well as deeper analysis of user journeys and experience optimization opportunities. Strengthening these capabilities enables data-driven decision-making, improves accountability, and lays the foundation for continuous improvement across DAP initiatives.

For DAP initiatives to become more effective, organizations at the Formative stage should begin formalizing their talent model to support more consistent execution. This includes clearly defining roles and responsibilities for internal DAP specialists and ensuring they have the foundational skills and capacity to support prioritized use cases.

To drive more effective outcomes, consider strengthening collaboration with DAP partners and specialists to move beyond transactional vendor relationships to strategic partnerships. Establishing structured and consistent engagement models, such as regular touchpoints, shared success metrics, and joint planning sessions, enables internal teams to better leverage external expertise. This accelerates solution design, improves implementation quality, and helps embed a DAP more effectively into day-to-day workflows. A collaborative approach not only builds internal capability but also ensures alignment with best practices and evolving platform capabilities.

Structured

Your score means your organization’s DAP maturity is at the intermediate stage.

Organizations in this stage typically have realized early impact in their DAP implementations and are becoming more effective and scalable. However, challenges remain in the following areas:

1. Strategy
• Organizations in this stage may show limited centralized executive sponsor and ownership of DAP initiatives, which can hinder strategic alignment and accountability. While initial goals may be defined and aligned to broader business objectives, the absence of a clear, actionable roadmap limits your organization’s ability to drive consistent implementation and long-term impact.
2. Execution
• Organizations often have started applying DAP across customer- and employee-facing use cases, with adoption expanding to around half of applications across their organization. However, workflows not yet fully embedded. A Center of Excellence / Enablement (COE) is typically established, but the teams are still working on setting up best practices and training, and continuous improvement initiatives are still maturing. While performance metrics are being tracked, organizations are not fully leveraging advanced analytics capabilities for deeper insights and user experience optimization.
3. Enablement
• While the digital adoption initiatives of these organizations may be supported by a dedicated team of specialists, their roles and impact may remain unclear without well-defined job descriptions and skill sets.

As a result, organizations like yours in the Structured stage, although are prioritizing improvements in areas such as user experience, employee productivity, and faster adoption of tools like CRMs and ERPs, often achieve partial effectiveness in these areas, highlighting opportunities to enhance DAP outcomes.

To advance to the next level of maturity and make DAPs more reproducible and intentional within your organization’s digital transformation journey, consider the following actions:

• Reinforce centralized leadership and a structured approach to scale DAP effectively
• Embed DAP into workflows and strengthen analytics capabilities for continuous optimization
• Establish appropriately resourced specialist teams with the right expertise and capacity

At the Structured stage, consider formalizing your DAP efforts by refining goals and further developing their Centers of Excellence/Enablement (COEs). Organizations should advance their DAP strategy from siloed, department-led efforts to a structured, repeatable, enterprise-wide capability.

Ideally, organizations should consolidate DAP ownership under a single executive sponsor and form a dedicated team to lead DAP initiatives across the organization. A well-functioning COE plays a critical role by capturing operational best practices, identifying gaps and redundancies, and addressing challenges arising from siloed implementations. It also develops standardized deployment frameworks, such as change management processes, reusable templates, and knowledge repositories, which reduces friction and ensures consistency.

A structured roadmap with defined objectives, milestones, and success metrics further reinforces strategic alignment and lays the foundation for scalable, coordinated execution.

To drive greater value from a DAP, organizations must go beyond simply layering features onto individual applications. Structured organizations should focus on embedding DAP into core user journeys across systems and departments.

In parallel, organizations should enhance their analytics capabilities to generate actionable insights from DAP usage and behavioral trends. Equally important is the ability to act on these insights, enabling data-driven decision-making, continuous user experience improvement, and a clear demonstration of DAP’s business impact. Together, these capabilities lay the groundwork for a more advanced, scalable DAP strategy.

For DAP initiatives to scale effectively, organizations require well-structured teams with flatter hierarchies that balance governance and flexibility. Having clear definitions of roles and streamlined workflows enable teams to make autonomous decisions at the departmental level.

Consider focusing on building and refining a lean team of DAP specialists with defined job scopes and skills to support enterprise-wide use cases. Internal champions and strategic partners can further embed DAP into daily operations while ensuring alignment with organizational practices.

With the right talent strategy and support model, a DAP can become a strategic enabler, driving agility and impact through lean and effective structures.

Proficient

Congratulations! Your score means your organization’s DAP maturity is at the advanced stage.

Your organization’s DAP implementations are often reproducible and intentional:

1. Strategy
• Organizations in this stage often have established a centralized executive sponsor or owner for DAP initiatives, providing strong leadership and alignment. They have a clear vision for their DAP, which is supported by well-defined goals aligned to broader business objectives, and reinforced by a structured, actionable roadmap that guides implementation.
2. Execution
• Organizations in this stage have made some progress embedding DAP across workflows, and typically utilize DAP capabilities in majority of their applications. A Center of Excellence / Enablement (COE) has been established to drive best practices, training, and continuous improvement of internal DAP practices. Your organization also tracks a comprehensive set of DAP performance metrics, and leverages advanced analytics to generate insights, understand user behavior, and optimize the user experience.
3. Enablement
• The digital adoption initiatives of organizations in this stage are well-supported by a dedicated team with clearly defined roles, skill sets, and understanding of the impact and value they bring to the organization.

As a result, organizations like yours in the Proficient stage are well-positioned to drive meaningful outcomes from your DAP investments. With a strong foundation in place, you typically achieve higher user engagement, faster tool adoption, and measurable improvements in productivity and experience across both employee and customer touchpoints.

To make DAPs more impactful in your organization’s digital transformation journey, consider the following actions:

• Orchestrate enterprise-wide DAP strategy through centralized leadership, sponsorship and dynamic road mapping
• Scale the DAP across enterprise workflows, and strengthen analytics for journey-level insights and user experience optimization
• Evolve talent and partnership strategy to sustain and scale the DAP
• Leverage a DAP to accelerate AI adoption to unlock strategic advantage

At the Proficient stage, centralized leadership should evolve from simply coordinating DAP efforts to orchestrating a dynamic, enterprise-wide strategy. The Centre of Excellence/Enablement (COE) must continuously refine its roadmap to reflect evolving business priorities, emerging technologies, and user needs. This includes ensuring governance frameworks are agile enough to support innovation while maintaining consistency. The focus should shift from scaling structure to scaling impact. There must be strong and sustained executive sponsorship for the DAP program.

If your organization has not yet formalized these elements or is in the early stages, consider investing in them to ensure strategic focus, resource alignment, and coordinated execution

While proficient organizations have embedded DAP into some workflows, they should now focus on fully integrating DAP into complex, end-to-end workflows that span multiple applications, roles, and departments. This ensures DAP moves beyond isolated apps to become a core enabler of how the organization operates at scale.

In parallel, analytics capabilities must evolve to deliver predictive, behavioral and ROI-focused insights to further optimize user experience and guide strategic decisions. Analytics for license optimization, managing shadow AI and insights on application performance will help you make informed software decisions for the business. If your organization has not yet developed a robust analytics strategy or fully integrated a DAP into end-to-end workflows, this is a critical next step to ensure adoption efforts are impactful, scalable, and aligned with emerging user needs.

At the Proficient stage, organizations must move beyond functional support models and adopt a centralized talent and partnership strategy that embeds DAP expertise across the enterprise. Consider formalizing DAP leadership roles, continuously upskilling a core team of specialists, and establishing clear governance that guides execution across business functions. The aim is to shift DAP from a project-based initiative, to an enterprise-wide digital transformation enabler, led by a specialized team with deep expertise and strategic oversight.

Continuous learning programs should be in place to upskill teams on DAP tools, analytics, and user experience design. While execution can be distributed across the organization, it should be guided by a centralized framework that defines roles, tools, and evaluation mechanisms, which will enable regular reviews to align, refine, and adapt DAP efforts to evolving business needs. DAPs should become part of the application transformation tool kit and organizations should strive to proactively manage software change across the enterprise.

Strategic partnerships with leading DAP vendors should be leveraged to enhance innovation, benchmarking, and peer learning. However, the priority should remain on building internal ownership and institutional knowledge within the dedicated DAP team to ensure long-term sustainability and agility.

Even among Proficient organizations, most have yet to fully leverage DAPs to support and accelerate employee adoption of AI. As AI becomes a strategic imperative and increasingly embedded in business operations, extending DAP strategies to enable AI adoption is a clear path to get the workforce AI-ready. This means embedding contextual guidance into AI-enabled workflows, using DAP analytics to track adoption patterns, and proactively addressing friction points. By aligning DAP efforts with AI rollouts, organizations can improve user confidence, reduce resistance, and ensure AI investments deliver measurable business impact.