By: Luke Bernardi, Sales Representative — EHS

I sat down with Sean Salvas, Senior Market Strategy Lead, Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) to discuss the importance of understanding where your organization is in their digital transformation journey, as a follow up to Origami’s February 2021 webinar How to Build an Engaging Safety Culture with EHS Technologies. 

Diving right in on the importance of maturity awareness, Sean kicked off our conversation by speaking to how “it’s important for safety practitioners to know where their organization stands on their digital transformation journey to determine the right processes and technology choices.” He continued, “this ultimately makes an impact in improving compliance, reducing administrative burden, and enhancing safety culture, among other benefits.”

Digital Transformation Maturity Curve Defined
Digital transformation varies from organization to organization —  IBM provides a framework for digital transformation maturity summarized in the image below.

The digital transformation curve illustrates where organizations stand in their technology capabilities.

To better understand where your organization lies, here is the definition of each stage of the process:

• Ad hoc: Individual efforts with no explicit process or organizational support. Little to no systems in place.
• Repeatable: Scattered, siloed approach with processes, still dependent on individuals. Disparate, decentralized systems.
• Defined: Standard roles and processes defined, initial enterprise-wide systems implemented to integrate silos.
• Managed: Enterprise-wide roles, processes, and systems fully-integrated, performance indicators monitored and evaluated.
• Optimized: Social collaboration, enhanced analytical tools, and feedback loops to facilitate real-time continuous improvement.

Understanding your team and your organization is essential to setting the right goals. For example, while wearable technology is certainly cutting-edge and exciting, if your organization only has ad hoc systems and no infrastructure in place, it might not be an appropriate near-term investment.

Impact of a Low-Maturity Digital Organization

Many of the organizations I speak with on a daily basis are still lower in their maturity journey and still largely trying to integrate processes, have a more collaborative view on safety initiatives and show continuous improvement. While I was speaking with Sean, he noted, “we see many organizations still having issues with disparate, legacy systems (such as spreadsheets, homegrown systems, and paper) that don’t really talk to each other or have a holistic view on compliance and safety culture.” For safety teams this means:

• Little to no incident reporting, meaning root causes cannot be identified and actions not taken
• Lack of compliance, resulting in citations and fines
• Limited visibility and transparency on safety programs and initiatives
• Difficulty proving results

Sean specified that the end result is that “incidents and hazards remain the same or even increase, impacting workers’ wellbeing and performance.”

How Can Origami Make Your Organization More Mature?
Origami can help transform your safety organization with our EHS suite - available on web and mobile. Sean indicated, “one of our clients was able to eliminate nearly 100 disparate systems by moving to our centralized platform to conduct audits, inspections, and behavior-based safety observations, manage incidents and investigations, and visualize impact with dashboards and reports.”

Origami’s EHS suite, available on web and mobile, not only includes comprehensive safety management (including audits, inspections, observations, investigations, dashboards and reporting) but also process safety management, occupational health, and environmental management.

Want to learn more about how Origami can help you in your digital transformation journey? Listen to our clients’ experiences or book a time to chat with me.