DMI™ is a credit rating-style score for an organization’s IT infrastructure risk
ScalePad’s Digital Maturity Index (DMI) is a dynamic score, recalculated daily, that objectively benchmarks your clients' IT environments against key productivity and risk factors. DMI provides a shared accountability framework for MSPs and their clients to make data-driven decisions on how to improve their technology outlook.
DMI is essentially a credit score for a technology environment, derived from analyzing it for risk. A 300 to 850 point scale was used to make it easy for you to explain to your clients, who may be familiar with scoring systems used by credit reporting bureaus to assess credit risk.
Here’s how DMI scoring breaks down on a per-client basis:
300 - 579 (Poor) - This client's infrastructure has major deficiencies. Productivity challenges and downtime are very likely.
580 - 669 (Fair) - There are significant deficiencies in this client's infrastructure. Productivity challenges and downtime are likely.
670 - 739 (Good) - There are notable deficiencies with this client's infrastructure. Productivity challenges still exist and downtime is less likely.
740 - 799 (Very Good) - There are fewer deficiencies with this client's infrastructure. Reduced productivity and downtime are possible but unlikely.
800 - 850 (Excellent) - This client's infrastructure is exemplary. Productivity challenges and downtime are unlikely.
If you or your clients aren’t familiar with credit scoring, not to worry — read on to learn more about how the DMI works and what it can do for you.
The DMI incorporates best practices as highlighted by our 9,000+ member partner base. Each partner has their own standards; however, DMI was created to identify the highest risks to clients to ensure they don't have a poor technology experience.
The DMI is an objective measurement of each clients' environment. It gives you a single number for each client, allowing you to quickly rank their infrastructure from best to worst. You can see which clients to prioritize for improvement initiatives before they get noisy and begin generating tickets.
Your MSP’s overall DMI score provides you with management insights as well — this is why we’ve included it in the Strategy dashboard.
DMI provides an objective measurement of each clients' environment and presents it as a single number. It’s a simplified common language for MSPs and clients to discuss that environment. It helps you and your clients make data-based decisions to improve their technology experience.
A higher score is always better. We recommend aspiring to the highest score possible so that clients have the best experience. That said, each client is unique and each business has different priorities and needs. A Very Good environment is likely acceptable.
We use a proprietary algorithm to score the health of your environment based on asset data. The minimum score is 300, with a maximum possible score of 850. Like a credit score assesses creditworthiness, DMI first and foremost assesses risk — because your MSP should be risk averse, the riskiest clients have the lowest scores, and clients with the least risk have the highest scores.
Your overall DMI is calculated from all assets under your MSP’s management. It is not an average of each clients' DMI™ scores.
A low DMI score means there are many opportunities for improving a client’s technology experience, and the Insights shown on the four panes of the Client dashboard show you the way.
Your top priority should be to address the four critical High-risk insights first, and then modernize your client’s other hardware and software. The least expensive and simplest way to mitigate risk (if your clients don’t have the budget to immediately replace aging servers) is to re-protect them with warranty coverage.
Depending on how your client currently scores, we recommend looking at different solutions to attack the problem and improve:
Here are some tips on where to start. Create initiatives to upgrade:
Propose hardware replacements quickly and easily with templated Initiatives right from the ScalePad platform. See our new Initiatives feature to learn more.
No, it does not. We offer ScalePad warranties on our platform as a better alternative to an outdated procurement process. Assets without warranties are an elevated risk, and we recommend all in-production devices have coverage.
A minimum of once per day. Check the update timer below the DMI score to see when it was last calculated. Environments are constantly aging and changing, so the score is updated dynamically.
While there may be valid business reasons for your client to have certain deprecated hardware assets or unsupported OSes or software, DMI highlights risks in that client's environment. Right or wrong, your client will submit a ticket if an issue arises, so you need to be aware of these assets and the associated risks since you will likely have to expend considerable resources to fix problems with them (or explain why you won’t touch that 15 year old production line control system).
If you’re already a ScalePad partner, simply sign in and start using the DMI today. If you are not a ScalePad partner yet, sign up today or book a demo with our Partner Development team.
