Digital Maturity Model

The digital revolution brings significant opportunities and threats, impacting every industry. Communication Service Providers (CSPs) need to be able to move fast to harness the opportunities and benefits offered by innovations in AI, automation, sustainability and ecosystem collaboration.  

The market is accelerating: hyperscalers are setting the pace in cloud and AI, digital-native challengers are redefining customer expectations, and regulators are pushing for openness and resilience.

To help TM Forum’s members navigate this complex digital transformation journey, leading CSPs and global consultancies have worked together in a collaboration project to develop the definitive telecommunications industry standard Digital Maturity Model (DMM).

The Digital Maturity Model is a pragmatic, umbrella model for senior telecoms leaders to guide transformation, built on the experience of telecoms experts and  lessons learned from numerous CSP assessments worldwide. DMM v5 integrates the six enterprise pillars of Customer, Strategy, Technology, Operations, Culture and Data with cross-cutting levers such as AI, autonomy, composability, ecosystem collaboration, sustainability, and cyber-resilience. The model creates a single compass that connects digital ambition to measurable business outcomes to enable one coherent transformation journey.

Digital Maturity Model Overview

The pace of technological change is accelerating and industry best practices are evolving rapidly. DMM v5 assessments enable CSPs to move decisively and focus on high priority areas of the business.   They are already seeing results of these best practices across 6 key areas:

• Customer: AI-driven personalization, proactive retention, and simplified journeys are proving to increase ARPU, reduce churn, and build brand stickiness.
• Strategy: Focus on developing holistic strategies for transformative innovation, ecosystem collaboration, sustainability management and technology enablement to deliver strategic business value.
• Technology: Cloud-native architectures, API-driven integration and open platforms reduce time-to-market and attract ecosystem partners.
• Operations: Predictive analytics, zero-touch automation, and digital twins are cutting downtime, enabling resilience, and reducing cost, at scale.
• Culture: Create organizational coherence with a focus on business value through engagement elevation, diversity of thought, a culture of learning from failure, and participatory decision-making.
• Data: Empower employees with reusable tools, shared data platforms, and AI-assisted decision-making to scale innovation.

With TM Forum’s digital transformation assessment methodology, you can identify where transformation or improvement is needed and investment is required.