Skills for digital transformation
Digital transformation is a popular theme these days. The major consulting firms all of digital transformation practices and we have been to several digital transformation (or digital innovation) summits over the past few months. Everyone from old school banks to trendy clothing companies wants a digital innovation strategy, or so they say.
Digital Transformation Services from some leading firms:Accenture, Bain, BCG, Deloitte, EY, IBM, McKinsey, PwC.
Even design firms like IDEO and frog are getting in on the act.
What is digital transformation and what skills will be need to support it?
Before we can answer this we need to say what we mean by Digital Transformation. Brian Solis has the most concise answer to this. "The realignment of, or new investment in, technology, business models, and processes to drive new value for customers and employees and more effectively compete in an ever-changing digital economy." He has even developed a model for the Six Stages of Digital Transformation.
Digital Transformation covers a wide variety of business practices, and there will be differences from industry to industry. In manufacturing the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will be a core enabler of transformation. In finance distributed ledger technologies like Blockchain, mobile interactions with customers and new approaches to solutions design may be more important.
What are the key skills for digital transformation?
The key skills in each sector are shown below.
Note that these are high-level skills. Each of these skills has many component and associated skills. These will different for each individual. There will be several underlying skill patterns. For example, with 'design thinking' there is one skill pattern centered on human-centered design with a UX flavor, another skill pattern centres around systems analysis and a third is organized around social interventions. All of these connect to design thinking, but they represent very different skill sets and approaches to innovation and problem solving.
There are some common themes here. We can tease out a set of underlying skills that are widely relevant.
Changing approaches to design
The importance of data
Wider understanding of stakeholders and communities
Automation and integration
Organizations committed to digital transformation need to understand three things.
What skills they have in their organization and where the current and skill gaps lie.
What potential skills they have and how the critical digital transformation skills can be developed.
The specific patterns of digital transformation skills that are needed for their business model and that will provide strategic differentiation.
The third point is critical for strategy. Many companies are working on digital transformation but there is no one size fits all solution. Each company has its own underlying skill pattern, its skill DNA so to speak. This guides potential and is the source of differentiation. Leadership needs to understand organizational skill DNA and how it can be expressed in a differentiated skill strategy. Ibbaka can help you with this through our Skill Insight process. In this process, we work with you to answer the three critical questions on digital transformation skills and design an action plan that will make your digital transformation strategy a success.
