This week saw the launch of PanLogic‘s digital engineering survey findings, looking at the state of planning maturity in the digital sector – manna to this digital strategist!   William Makower, Panlogic’s Founder says:

To draw a parallel from the construction industry, clients work with architects and quantity surveyors before putting out a tender for the build. It is not the builders who plan and design the building.

You can request a copy of the research on PanLogic’s website.

Panlogic have defined the term ‘digital engineering’: the provision of independent advice on strategy and digital business change.  The crucial element here is independent – if you buy (or usually get bundled-in or ‘free’ advice) from a digital agency, not surprisingly, often their recommendation is to build ‘stuff’ that their in-house development teams can deliver.  

Highlights from  Panlogic’s survey of digital, commercial and marketing professionals:

Clients lack confidence in their digital strategy
40% of clients flag issues relating to their readiness and confidence in their digital strategy – this is likely to be because most businesses have organic digital growth, not a strategic road map.

Projects are not integrated
Most clients have worked on multiple digital projects in the last 2-3 years, creating risk and complexity around duplication.

The outcome horizon is short-term
66% of projects need to deliver return-on-investment within a year.  This places pressure on delivery time frames and potential compromises user experience.

Digital can’t get no satisfaction
Overall client satisfaction levels are pitiful at just 30%.  70% of clients commissioning work are not happy with the end product.

 Managing external agencies is difficult
50% of clients don’t have the capability or capacity (by their own definition) to successfully articulate requests and manage the relationship with their digital suppliers.  50% of clients would consider outsourcing their stakeholder requirement development.

I attended the launch of this research at NESTA.  As part of an interesting round-table discussion we talked about the slow maturation of digital industry: the industry is slowly growing-up and getting better at defining and selling what it can do.  Clients are better understanding what they want, but not always how they need to request and get it.

Outsourcing digital delivery is a mixed bag: the skills to successfully manage outsourcing companies is often lacking, even in specialist digital agencies. Ethically, I don’t really agree that we should be off-shoring skilled digital jobs to other economies when Britain has the potential to deliver best-in-breed digital work and grow skills and create jobs.

My main take-out: I feel the digital sector needs to get serious about addressing dis-satisfaction and get real about delivering results.  You don’t have a 70% disatisfaction from a wedding planner – so why can other sectors define and deliver great customer service, and the digital industries, more often than not, cannot?

Digital engineering is a progressive concept which I hope businesses will start to embrace and adopt. I look forward to seeing more self-defined digital engineers helping to shape a better digital service sector.

For more on the digital engineering research, see PanLogic’s website.

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