Richard Bhanap: Native digital orgs show 5 point leadership blueprint
If we look at native digital organisations, or those businesses that have created digital ventures or transformed existing capabilities to be digital – particularly, for example, in the le – in the industries that have been pioneering digital around media, around retail and so on, there are a number of patterns that we can begin to track, which actually relate very nicely to previous waves of IT enabled or technology enabled business transformation.
So appointing a digital leader, in the C-suite, is an important step – someone to champion the digital agenda, not necessarily to own it, but to champion it, is critically important. That could be a chief digital officer – in some organisations that may well be the best answer.
But it’s by no means enough. One of the critical findings from our study is that in the future, digital will become part of everybody’s job. And the risk of having a chief digital officer or someone in the C-suite with the title “digital” is that people start to abdicate to them and say ‘That’s your job, you deal with it, leave me alone’. Our sense is, abdicating digital to a chief digital officer is the equivalent of retiring. Appointing a champion for digital at the C-suite, is an important first step. Kick-starting a process for shaping the digital agenda, the strategy, the proposition, the business model, how you’re going to make that happen, the transformation journey, is another key step. The third and fourth steps revolve around your workforce, ensuring that you’re building the digital IQ of your organisation, and if necessary recruiting or acquiring the digital talent that you will need to transform your business and also, frankly, to coach your C-suite through the transition. And then finally, the fifth point I think is to make sure that your enterprise IT function transforms itself, so that in future it runs not just the IT stuff, but also all the underpinning infrastructure and capability to bring digital to life in the front of the business.
Richard Bhanap, Research Associate, Leading Edge Forum
Interview via CSC’s Leading Edge Forum
https://leadingedgeforum.com/
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