SMEs: from Digital Morocco 2030 to your own roadmap

What the strategy changes for an SME

Launched on 25 September 2024, Digital Morocco 2030 rests on two pillars, e-government and the digital economy, with artificial intelligence as a cross-cutting lever. Its 2030 targets: 240,000 direct digital jobs, 100,000 people trained every year and 3,000 startups.

For an SME, these figures translate into very concrete changes:

• More and more procedures go paperless: administration, tax, public procurement. Companies that already run digital processes adapt without friction.
• More demanding customers and contractors: online quotes, real-time tracking, secure document exchange.
• A growing cloud offering in Morocco, with local hosting options that make Law 09-08 compliance easier.
• Threats follow digitisation: the more connected a company is, the larger its attack surface.
• Competition for talent: digital profiles are in demand, so you need to attract them and upskill your teams.

The goal is not to “digitise everything”, but to pick the few projects that will have the most impact on your business, and to see them through.

Step 1: take stock

Before choosing tools, measure where you stand. Score your company from 1 (nothing in place) to 4 (under control and measured) on six dimensions:

Strategy

Does management have written digital objectives, with a budget and an owner?

Processes

Are repetitive tasks (quotes, invoicing, purchasing, HR) supported by tools, or still on paper and spreadsheets?

Data

Do you know where your customer data is, who can access it and how it is backed up?

Information system

Do your applications talk to each other? Are they up to date and supported by their vendor?

Security

Multi-factor authentication, tested backups, updates, an incident response plan: what is in place?

Skills

Are your teams trained on their tools and aware of the risks (phishing, passwords)?

Ask management, but ask users too: they are the ones who know about double data entry and everyday workarounds.

Step 2: prioritise

List every possible project, then place each one on two axes: value to the business (time saved, revenue, risk reduction) and effort (cost, duration, change for your teams).

• High value, low effort: start now. These are your quick wins.
• High value, high effort: your structural projects, to plan and fund.
• Low value: postpone, whatever the effort.

Keep three to five projects a year at most. Beyond that, teams spread themselves thin and nothing gets finished.

Step 3: build the roadmap

Organise the selected projects into three horizons:

The first 90 days: foundations

• An inventory of computers, servers, software and accounts.
• Multi-factor authentication on email and remote access.
• Automatic backups, including an offline copy, with a restore test.
• Business email and file sharing, with clear access rights.

Months 3 to 12: key processes

• Digitising one or two high-volume processes (quotes and invoicing, purchasing, leave management…).
• Moving suitable applications to the cloud, with hosting that fits your data constraints.
• A website and online services that meet your customers’ expectations.

Months 12 to 24: data and AI

• Management dashboards fed automatically.
• First AI use cases on your own documents (internal assistant, document search), within a controlled framework.

For each project, record an owner, a budget, an end date and a success indicator. A roadmap without owners is just a wish list.

Step 4: fund it

Cost each project in full: licences or subscriptions, integration, training, and the yearly running cost. The latter is often forgotten, yet it is what weighs over time.

Public programmes support the digital transformation of very small, small and medium-sized businesses. Their conditions change: check with Maroc PME, your Regional Investment Centre and your bank which schemes are open when you launch your project.

Step 5: steer and adjust

Hold a one-hour quarterly review with management. A few indicators are enough:

• progress of each project (done, in progress, late);
• time saved or errors avoided on digitised processes;
• adoption rate of the new tools;
• security incidents and backup test results.

Take stock again every year: your scores should improve, and your priorities may change.

The most common mistakes

• Starting with the tool rather than the problem to solve.
• Forgetting security until the first incident.
• Underestimating change management: a tool nobody uses brings nothing.
• Piling up suppliers with nobody responsible for the whole.

How FIDO TEAM can help

We carry out the digital maturity assessment in two weeks, then build a costed roadmap with you. We can then implement it step by step: cloud, cybersecurity, development and AI, with a single point of contact. Request a free quote.