Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs Pyramid

Irrespective of your undergrad or grad school major, chances are high that you studied Maslow's hierarchy of needs in one of your courses. Maslow proposed that human needs can be organized into a hierarchy to understand better what motivates human beings. This hierarchy ranges from more concrete needs—such as food and water—to more abstract concepts, such as self-fulfillment. According to Maslow, when a lower need is met, the following need on the hierarchy becomes our focus of attention. Image credit: Simplypshychology.com

Key Takeaways from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

• There are five categories of needs: physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization, as shown in the actualization pyramid above.
• People move to another level in the hierarchy when they feel they have sufficiently satisfied the previous need.
• Although later research does not fully support all of Maslow’s theory, his research has impacted other psychologists and contributed to the field of positive psychology.

Leveraging the hierarchy for defining Digital Transformation needs

My ideal approach to planning Digital Transformations is based primarily on a straightforward aspect: Transformations should be driven by needs. These needs will be unique for each business at all levels of the hierarchy of needs in the Digital Transformation needs hierarchy, ranging from "must have" to "nice to have" to "futuristic."

Why Maslow's Hierarchy?

We live in an era of Empathy driven, innovation and disruption. If you peel the layers of the onion, you will find that technologies used by many disruptors were not radically new. In my mind, the key driver behind these successful disruptors was the ability to identify a customer need and provide a solution. That is why I believe that understanding customer needs and leveraging Emotional Quotient and Empathy skills will become one of the most critical expertise organizations need to develop to stay relevant in the Digital age. No other framework has more prominence or acceptability, as far as understanding levels of human needs are concerned than Maslow's hierarchy. Marketers have leveraged this to push the needs of their customers to the next level for decades. Now is the right time to extrapolate this hierarchy to the Digital Transformation perspective.

Hierarchy of needs for Digital Transformation

I will use Maslow's hierarchy of needs to develop a hierarchy of needs for Digital Transformation. For this illustrative example, I will deviate from my comfort zone to foray into the world of Digital Marketing and use a high-level example from that domain. The modified hierarchy, with each level and the high-level needs for each level, have been shown in the illustrations below.

Key Takeaways from Digital Transformation Hierarchy of Needs

• Needs of employees in terms of Digital tools and capabilities follow a hierarchy very similar to Maslow's
• Fulfilling the basic needs of employees/organizations is foundational to building your Digital capabilities further to fulfill higher-level needs.
• A stepwise approach to fulfilling the Digital needs of your employees and organization is the best and, in my mind, the only approach to planning a successful Digital transformation.

What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders?

Once you have mapped out the needs, after interactions, interviews, and process analysis, you can map the current Digital capabilities and quickly reconcile them with the needs hierarchy. That essentially then gives you a starting point in terms of (examples): (1) Which level the organization currently is at? (2) Where are they within that level (have they developed maturity?) What capabilities do they need to develop that maturity? (3) Do they need to go back to a lower level to fulfill some unfulfilled need? Holistic digital transformation solutions are layered and hierarchical for the same reason. Building true digital transformation capability is always a stepwise process. If you analyze the components of RISE with SAP offering, it allows organizations to fulfill a need in each component as they progress further in their digital transformation journey by leveraging the offering.