Digital Transformation Capability – Right Practice #2

Challenge: Currently, not only IT departments feel the shock of digital transformation but also since every department across the entire enterprise is supposedly involved, a huge demand for digital skills has been created among business professionals. The shortage of skills for digital transformation in the current marketplace is unprecedented.

Market General Approach

Large and medium enterprises engage with big consulting firms to overcome the challenge of their skills shortage. However, the big consulting firms are dealing with the same challenge and therefore, they go to the market to find and headhunt digital skills.

Right Practice

Large and medium enterprises to be engaged with independent professionals with the digital transformation skill-set and let them coach and build internal capabilities for digital transformation programs. These professionals are called Digital Guides, who help their clients think inside a bigger box. Digital Guides help technical teams strengthen their understanding of the business and help business professionals to understand the language of IT. #InsideBiggerBox

If interested, you may read this article for Thinking Inside A Bigger Box and this article for Best Practice and Right Practice.

Current Approaches to Developing Digital Skills ARE Broken

In “The Digital Talent Gap: Developing Skills for Today’s Digital Organisations” report Capgemini says companies realize the gap and its importance, and yet:

• only 46% of companies are investing in developing digital skills.
• training programs are out of sync and only 4% of companies we interviewed are aligning their training efforts with their digital strategy.
• many companies continue to use traditional approaches to sourcing digital skills.
• HR is not actively involved in this development. We found that only 30% of organisations have mentioned HR as being actively involved in skills development.

Markus Nordline, CIO Zurich Insurance says:

I believe that the successful leaders of tomorrow are going to be true hybrid professionals who have spent some time in IT but have shifted to operations and vice-versa.

The role of Digital Guides

Digital Guides will help their clients to focus on the potential digital solutions that support their key strategic goals, among all the other possible options. They also build and coach business and IT professionals to learn digital transformation skills, communicate in a language that both parties understand and collaborate in creating digital solutions.

Establishing internal digital transformation capability is only a part of the overall digital transformation plan. Enterprises will have to continue maintaining the benefit that they receive through these skills. This means the role of Digital Guides will continue to maintain the skill-set required for future digital transformation. Engaging Digital Guides is the first and vital action of an endless effort to continuous digital transformation.

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