Who should control digital in your business?

Photo credit: dada 2014

Do a Google search on the above question and you’ll likely be bombarded by huge amounts of opinion pieces and research papers that extol the rise of the CIO as the true controller of the digital agenda, or the CMO who has been custodian of the first customer touchpoint and heralded as the key to unlocking the mysteries of social or even the Customer Services Director, the one who understands the customer best because they know how to really listen.  But then again, we are also told it’s the CTO - as surely digital and technology are synonymous with each other and therefore this is the most obvious answer – Digital is all about tech right?! 

You would be forgiven for feeling pretty confused at this point.  There are vast amounts of research studies being undertaken on the subject of Digital Transformation, even more articles and scholarly theorems trying to shed light on one thing whilst throwing into chaos something else.  So what do you do if you are a leader or a leadership team starting to talk about this ‘thing called digital’ and discussing ‘what we do about it then?’  Or maybe you are an impassioned manager or leader (any one of the titles above) totally frustrated by the lack of urgency and understanding of those around you, feeling like you are in an alternative universe – you can see that you are heading straight towards disaster without introducing urgent change but everyone else is high fiving the last quarterly results and celebrating growth or savings - with no change seen as a key indicator for business success. 

Digital Transformation is no longer about a single project, identified as an urgent seismic (usually technology) shift required to ‘stay alive’ – from legacy to cloud, from silo to integration, or from static to responsive.  Digital Transformation has been around now formally for about 5 years and has matured to mean something that touches every single aspect of your business and your people.  It’s about culture as much as technology, it’s about constant change, which means becoming adaptive in every way, shape and form, in the way you do business today.

So, back to the question – who should control digital?  Well the cop out answer you might think is everyone.  But seriously, we do need to realise as businesses, business leaders, business owners that digital is a catalyst for a more democratic business model – so this answer isn’t that lame all of a sudden.  And let’s face it, the traditional business model doesn’t really reflect a democracy when you consider decision-making, policy and organisational structure etc. etc. does it? 

If everyone is in control of it, how do you ensure ‘it’ happens and who leads?

Digital requires management and control, monitoring and measurement like all things – it’s no different.  And, as with any business is also requires leadership, supported by processes, policies and governance, not inhibited by them.

It would also be easy to think that leadership of Digital can be boxed into the role of a Digital Leader or the increasingly popular CDO – but for everything digital stands for; openness, transparency, immediacy and knowledge, do we really want to start to create new silos?  I think not.  Digital Leaders, CDO’s are the invaluable component that should drive the engine of digital but there is much leadership required in addition, to ensure Digital really becomes pervasive, the new norm, simply ‘the way we do things around here’, not to mention the collective leadership and advocacy required to drive change. 

No one should think they own digital.  That’s a recipe for disaster.  That’s why a new mindset and new approaches to governance are required.  If you really look at the leadership roles of a business, control and ownership is naturally eroding due to digital too – but not in a negative way, in a way that heralds openness, transparency, immediacy and knowledge...  The CMO or Marketing Director no longer controls brand, or owns content – the audience does, the CTO no longer owns or controls technology in all it’s guises - the business does. 

So all leadership needs to change?  Yes.  All leadership needs to adapt to the digital world we live in. Read one of my prior blog posts for more on this.

It’s a tough one but possibly the answer is everyone and no one is in control of digital, everyone and no one owns digital.  But where does that statement leave us in terms of tangible ‘to do’ lists for the next management meeting or board report?  Before you go down the route of ownership and control, assigning digital as a special project or even agreeing the title for a new recruitment, here are just a few guiding thoughts and ideas for you to think about: 

1) Create a sense of urgency

2015 is apparently the year of personalisation and relevancy when it comes to marketing and communications.  2015 is the year of Wearables and the Internet of Things if you think pure Tech. 

Looking at these two points alone, if you haven’t grasped digital as a business wide imperative and still think it’s all about technology or all about delivery within a siloed functional area of your business, how on earth are you going to cope?  For Personalisation you need data, for access to data you need cloud and integration, for use of data you need visibility, for exploitation of Wearables and the Internet of Things you need data, cloud and integration…do you have these?  And, do you have the skills to create, develop, deliver, test and improve these?  Do you have a culture that can cope with these things that change how we do business, or who we do it for? We could even be faced with the question of what we do?

If you can’t say yes to all this stuff, your need to wake up to digital is urgent – maybe fast becoming business critical.  You need the foundation blocks in place before you start to get smart.

2) Don’t bypass hierarchy, support it

Find subtle ways to support the learning and increased understanding of the positive aspects of digital amongst the general leadership.  Some senior leaders still think digital is about Twitter, or it’s for the youngsters.  There is no blame or fault here, just a reality that requires action. Organise some general workshops with digital themes to help them understand where it is relevant to them, or show them the art of the possible.  We often carry out an exercise that asks people to think about what their workplace and business will look like in 5 years time.  At the end of the exercise we list everything on the board and run through the list quickly to show what already exists and give examples.  More often than not in excess of 90% is already in existence.  We must have a focus on sharing and showing what’s available and what’s happening beyond the obvious line of vision to help bring leaders along the journey. 

3) The three C’s of Communication 

Whether you are a CIO, CTO, CEO, CFO you must now understand the business value and true importance of communication.  I remember a manager of mine very early on in my professional career saying to me that there are three C’s in communication:  Communication, Communication, and Communication.  So, tell people, show people and share with people what you are doing and what the possibilities of digital are.  Encourage people to respond and engage. Repeat your message in as many ways as possible and send it out as far and wide as possible.  Lack of communication is often a significant contributor to failed projects.  It’s not the job of the Communications team or the marketing team, it’s your job!

These are just three things you should be thinking about.  There are plenty more that make up the recipe for successfully becoming adaptive across technology and people.  Once you realise that there is an element of control in regard to digital that exists with everyone, and that the leadership required is more about custodian and facilitator you will be on the right track.  Many people talk to me about culture being something that is going to be the hardest thing to tackle about becoming a digital business.  My response is, look inward.  If you evaluate the demographics of your employees and suppliers you will already see a growing number of individuals frustrated with the way your company is run – and they are not totally wrong, not should they be dismissed because they will soon be the majority within your business.

We can no longer try and solve a 21st century business problem using 20th century processes, methods, ideas or structures.  We must resist the temptation to think of Digital Leadership as a role of control or ownership and think of it more as a facilitator, a custodian, advisor and person able to show you the art of the possible.  We really need to let go in order to see where control is really needed in this new and exciting digital world.

Who is really in control of digital? If you don’t know, read on

Do a Google search on the above question and you’ll likely be bombarded by huge amounts of opinion pieces and research papers that extol the rise of the CIO as the true controller of the digital agenda, or maybe the CMO who has been the first customer contact and supposedly the key to unlocking the mysteries of social or perhaps even customer services, those who understand the customer best due to more physical contact.  But then we are told it is the CTO as surely digital and technology are synonymous with each other and this is the most obvious answer.  With vast amount of research studies being undertaken on the subject of Digital Transformation, we also see that the most consistent element for success of any kind of business wide Digital Transformation is the CEO.

Well, that just about covers most of the senior people on your leadership team, without even mentioning the rise of the CDO (Chief Digital Officer).

Personally we believe they are all wrong. 

Why?  The opinions above only serve to do two things:

1. Try and solve a 21st century business problem using 20th century structures and ideas

2. Start to cause the very thing you don’t want, that of ill perceived ownership of something that just simply doesn’t belong to you.

That’s all well and good but what is the answer?

The answer is easy, though when you first read it you’ll think we’ve led you down the garden path:

The Audience.  The audience is in control of it.  When this is understood, you can start to address the key steps you must take to begin to adapt to the changing digital world. 

Who is the Audience?  Audience can be defined as any human being that has contact with your business.  There are four main audience pillars with one new pillar emerging.

In a digital world customer centricity is not enough.  The engagement, competency and capability of your workforce will determine your effectiveness in customer engagement. Equally supplier and partner relationships are becoming deeper and more experimental. The emerging audience pillar is fast becoming a strategic asset for digital businesses; The Crowd.  From design to investment, from customer support to marketing, the crowd is quickly becoming a game changer for many businesses. 

But back to the topic question:  Who is in control.  Well if the audience is in control that leaves us where?  It actually leaves us quite rightly where we should be, in a horizontal and collaborative situation.  Consider the following scenario:

The CEO has ultimate ownership and command of the vision.  That vision is the digital vision and the business vision all rolled into one. The digital strategy, usually in parallel with the business for those only just beginning their journey towards being digitally adaptive, is owned by those who control the fundamental areas supporting audience control.  The implementation and delivery of the strategy is controlled by a slightly wider team that includes communicators, influencers and advocates.

If you are writing a digital strategy ensure you bring the right people to the table at the start, but remember one thing, always have a seat for the audience. For us that means an in-depth understanding of audience journeys. This should be of equal importance at that table to those who have a physical invite.

Ensuring your business becomes audience centric to survive in a digital world means bringing the core leaders together, under the CEO’s vision to build a strategy, with the main stakeholders owning the strategy. A team effort will lead you along the path to success.

Keeping pace with digital change

Digital is vast. It has redefined IT, Sales & Marketing, Customer Service and Operations; every area of the business and every industry sector has been changed forever. Why? Because the demands of the customer and the employee are rising at a pace faster than most businesses are adapting to these cope with these changing needs. This pace and the fundamental “access all areas” shift that digital has created has also generated a melting pot for new and disruptive competitors into sometimes hugely monopolised verticals.  If you want to find out more, pick up a copy of James McQuivey’s Digital Disruption.

The bottom line is clear for all CEO’s and business leaders. To be a leader in a digital world you need to:

• Really commit to digital

• Be prepared to go back to school – build up your knowledge and understanding of digital and the opportunities it can bring to your organisation

• Adopt a mindset that focuses on finding the right pace that matches your customers

• Keep pace with your customers (that’s digital maturity)

• Don’t delegate your vision; own the vision and empower the organisation to implement it

When something comes along that fundamentally changes the way we do business across the globe, we still see a struggle to take hold of both the challenge and the opportunity. All too often this results in a failure to use it to our advantage.

As far as digital is concerned, we still have a long way yet to go.

Christopher Columbus went out in a ship and realised the world was round.  Similarly, businesses need to realise digital is pervasive, it has no edges. It has changed things forever because it’s shown us that what was once thought to be the throne of power has flipped. The customer drives the pace of business now.  Customer Experience is a business-wide priority and Digital neither resides within the siloes of IT or Marketing. In fact, digital is not owned, digital just is.

Seize the moment

If you are a CEO, I hope you have already actively embraced digital and matured beyond allowing it to live in those siloes. I hope you have seized the moment, and that you are learning and awakening an almost youthful passion for experimentation and change. I hope, also, that you are beginning to experience and realise that honest and open communication is reciprocated tenfold in sales and advocacy.

On the other hand you might be about to head into a meeting to assess the business Quartile results thus far, only to realise sales are down, morale is at an all time low and the board wants answers… If so, commit to digital!  Think not about how you are currently performing. Think about how you are currently losing out because you haven’t already started to drive change in a way that is adaptive; your opportunity to really increase market share, enter new markets and gain competitive edge. We need a call to arms.  Those of you who have taken onboard the role of a true leader, I encourage you to share your stories, to seek out other peers and help them make the move.

Becoming Digitally Adaptive is no buzzword, but a call for all leaders to ensure they are aware and actively addressing the transition required to stay in the game.

The Digital Skills Gap - How it can harm business and how to make sure it doesn't harm yours

Finding the right digital skills to deliver business results is becoming more difficult – Fact.  Training establishments are finding it harder and harder to keep up to date with client needs. The discussion around who should lead the digital agenda within the business is fuelling huge debate and there is a recognised but fundamental gap on the educational side to enable existing and new employees to deliver on this digital promise.

Let’s look at where the digital gaps are within business:

• Right at the top. There is the skill at the top – it’s more to do with understanding but it’s still as important as any other area. Digital Leadership is needed within every business.

• Digital Management. Then there is digital skill at a management level…those who require an on-going understanding of what is going on, what is working, what success looks like and the drive to experiment…the person who is able to know what data matters and how to make it matter.

• Then there are the specialist digital skills areas – those individuals who have specific skills in a particular digital discipline. With the speed at which our digital lives are changing and our demands as consumers are changing, it’s becoming harder and harder for businesses to seek out the talent they need.

The real challenge ahead

There is a real challenge here.  A challenge, which is impacted by the changing digital landscape demanding different needs around every corner.  And, with the maturity of digital channels like social media, the skills gap further increases as you realise it’s no longer just about a social media manager, you need specialist data analysts, sentiment and outreach specialists, content creators, curators and commenters…integration managers. New skills are needed to understand and recognise how digital channels mature and usage changes. Skills to deal with new technologies that allow us to better understand the business value of these channels.  And finally broader skills and understanding to recognise and address the mass migration of digital channels out of marketing and into the business as a whole.

The solution, though not an easy one, can be split into two key areas: Skills and Understanding.  First and foremost a solid understanding of the digital landscape and its value to the business is needed at the very top of the business.  As important as access to the skills required is the knowledge and understanding of what skills are required, and this has to come from the very top.

The challenge from a business perspective:

1) Right at the top:  How do you bring a senior team up to speed on the real impact of digital? Not just in terms of it’s value, but the reality of the time, resource and financial commitment required to reap the benefits of it.  Often a lack of understanding at a leadership, even a board level breeds misconceptions to how digital works.  That it is pretty easy so key investment is at the lower end of the scale, or that agile means doing things quicker and cheaper to achieve instant results requires less headcount.  Well, digital skills don’t come cheap anymore; it’s not about placing a 20-year-old graduate in front of a computer and calling them the social media manager.  Yes, it’s about bringing young talent who are digital natives on board but not so that they drown, they need a sound digital strategy and direction to follow.  And an agile methodology is best described as one which can ebb and flow with change but remain true to the end goal…this is brilliant for Digital – an area which most certainly changes like the tide with new ways of doing old things and old ways re-engineered.  Digital today most certainly cannot be contained within the silo of one department.  It requires the integrated efforts and teamwork of marketing, technology, operations etc. to succeed and that takes senior digital leadership to achieve.  So remember to start right at the top when addressing your digital skills gaps.

And, a good thing or not, as we mature more into this digital age we live in, we will realise there are so many areas which require dedicated skills and effort to achieve results – data is a case in point – with the dawn of Big Data going mainstream and becoming relevant even to small businesses, access to skills and understanding here become real business needs.

2) Digital Management.  How does a digital leader or a digital manager maintain a level of digital knowledge and understanding which means they can direct, they can manage, they know what they are looking for and what success looks like for their business.  This is a difficult one – it’s arguably the role which should be responsible for the digital business, they should be adept enough to manage up and prove the case for digital.  Then they need to be able to translate this into exactly what resource and technology is needed to achieve results.

The role of a Digital Manager is one, which often get’s left behind at the expense of Digital Leadership roles.  Digital Leadership is the ultimate business champion for the digital agenda across the business.  A Digital Manager has the solid knowledge in terms of delivery and execution to make it happen.

3) The Digital Specialist.  Finally how does the Digital Specialist today know when they become a generalist of tomorrow?  Something quite unique to the digital world is how fast a generalist role needs to be split into specialist areas.  To stick with the example of social media, when it was a fad for some or early adopted by others, the world of social media was owned and managed by the PR or Marketing team.  Very soon after we saw people being employed as social media managers, directors etc, that was about 7 years ago give or take.  This is where many companies still are, but those who have understood the science of social and it’s value to so many different areas of the business have done one of three things – or a combo thereof:  segment out the skills in social media into separate headcount, include the social management for the business within a senior headcount or invest and or employ the services of sophisticated software or skilled agencies.

As each digital area becomes segmented through ease of access, more sophisticated access and data access, there comes the need to have someone capable of harnessing these to gain business advantage.  What’s missing is the recognition of this cycle of change. Training and skills organisations need to be able to deal with this cycle.  There is hope.  We are seeing more and more bite sized training models being adopted by organisations making it easier for courseware to be created – we are also seeing a digital revolution happen in the world of training and development with an increasing amount of individuals seeking to self learn and adopt virtual learning methods.

Back to the question at large.  Knowing the digital age is only set to diversify and segment even further with time, how are we as businesses going to be able to see what’s coming?  Can we plan for it?  Do we simply wait and see?  Well it doesn’t have to be all about wait and see – because if we are unable to grasp the opportunity of digital as and when it arises we are missing something fundamental.

What’s needed is a change.  A big change.  There is talk of social business and how that will change the established business model borne of the industrial revolution forever.  Well, it’s time to also rethink learning and development.  Technology, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Management, HR, Finance, Supply Chain, it’s difficult to think of an area of business not affected by the digital revolution.  And each one in it’s own right is demanding access to changing digital skills and changing digitally skilled talent.

What can you do?

Here are our 5 key points to keep you ahead.

1) Make sure your business gets real.  If the commitment and understanding is not there at the top in terms of digital then rethink your strategy.  First and foremost you have to get a level of understanding amongst the most senior members of the organisation.  Digital is a boardroom agenda point.  Make it so.  One very important point to mention here is to ensure that any digital agenda discussed and adopted by your organisation must not start and finish with IT.  It has to include all areas of the business.

2) Get digital metrics or some basic digital KPIs into management reporting – whether it’s customer service, automation, online leads and sales…get the language and the reporting as high up the ladder as possible.

3) Don’t play what we call Recruitment Mousetrap…employing people and skills you ‘think’ you need but don’t really know you need – what will happen is that person will be set for failure unless they are extraordinary individuals.  Recruit when you absolutely know you need that skill and need it on a permanent basis.  Be clear about the level of skill.  A way to dodge the Recruitment Mousetrap game and benefit from accessing the skills you need is to employ people on a project basis, on an interim basis.  Employing temporary staff in a new discipline mitigates the risk of finding out 6 – 12 months down the track you need someone totally different.

A word of caution on recruitment:  When seeking out the a new headcount it has never been more important to define the role to the last detail for specific skills as there is a growing lack of consistency across the talent pool when you measure against roles.  What I am saying is we can’t compare apples with apples anymore.  People’s job titles, skills and experience are increasingly personal to them so you have to invest time to flesh out the job description.

4) Encourage and commit to on-going learning and development.  This is the only way you can keep abreast of what’s going on in digital.  Putting a staff member onto an expensive digital marketing course has its benefits but there is no substitute for on-going development and access to learning materials as and when they are required.  If you employ the services of an agency, investigate what resources they have available to you and your team.  Work with your HR department to rethink the training requirements for your teams to include a mixture of learning methods to suit individual needs as well as access to up to date training.

5) Keep abreast of digital trends.  Things are always changing in digital, as in life, that’s the only constant.  Find ways of staying on top of digital trends.  A simple way to do this is to use one of the content aggregator tools available out there.  They are mostly free:  Swayy, Google Currents, Push, Zite – you can put in the subject areas you want to keep up to date with and they will deliver to your mobile device every time you login.

This isn’t the definitive list of do’s and don’ts to address the digital skills gap – but it’s a start and I hope it helps you by provoking thought if nothing more.

The key is to remember that digital skills apply to three areas of the business.  That what exists today will not be the blueprint for success tomorrow.  Accepting change as a constant and addressing that within your business model will draw far greater success than waiting until it’s too late and your competitor got there before you.

Mel Ross