The importance of 'Everyone' in building Digital DNA

Check out our very own Mel Ross, Director, Experience at the Digital Leaders Conference - selling the importance of 'Everyone' in building Digital DNA.

Digital Leadership? Or Leadership in a Digital World?

Digital Leadership: it’s a buzzword in the business world. As a business leader, you will have noticed you can’t open a website or go to a conference without being acutely aware that you need to take your organisation in a more ‘digital’ direction.

You are, however, in danger of going the wrong way. For the phrase has created an impression – possibly a false one -  that being digital is about technology and that digital leadership is about having a single leader. If you think this, you’ll likely find yourself on a slippery slope. To say that digital is not just about technology is the subject of numerous posts and muses online so we won't go into it here. However, digital leadership actually comes in many guises and you must recognise and ensure you have all present to start strong and embark on a complete rethink of current business models to ever hope to really engage socially on a wider scale.

Nothing new here but leadership is not all about a single person but about a coalition of power, vision and skill that starts and more importantly maintains transformation. Businesses need technology change, people change, culture change, complete business change; and one person alone cannot do this.

First and foremost a wholehearted mandate for an organisational sea change from you and your team at the highest level of business, will secure success for your organisation in the digital future. You then need people of influence, with expertise and skill-sets in technology, communication, people and culture.  

For although we said that digital is not all about tech, tech is going to play a huge part in your transformation efforts. Communication is another key area that often gets paid no more than lip service in transformational efforts. And a good communications (or engagement) plan is therefore an essential and not a desirable in any digital transformation.

People hold the key to creating credibility and commitment to the digital journey.  Culture change is on the cards because the way you do things at every level of business is going to change and only the right mindset will allow for this to happen.

Believers, inspirers, people who are willing to have a go, to test things, try things and learn new things are necessary. These are the people that already have the mindset of change.  They will create momentum to help move along the transformational process.  They are your first advocates. Go out and find them before you tackle anything else.

Lastly, one of the major outputs of digital transformation is the democratisation of business.  So you need to bring some new and fresh digital native blood into the mix too. There is much for us to learn from the born digitals, as there is much for the digitals to learn from experience.

As you can see, becoming a digital business involves getting power, capability, advocacy and new blood working holistically to secure your businesses place on the new modern world stage.

This is the beginning of your journey to becoming adaptive. To start strong, to understanding where you are in the journey to know where to focus; vision, rather than a digital strategy, to guide the organisation to becoming more digital; good-news stories demonstrating the success digital to inspire the whole business. 

To summarise, there is no single point of leadership that drives digital transformation. Whilst the trigger or 'change agent' might be a single person you must quickly bring the key competencies together to form your coalition.  Secondly, start to deliver and execute through a broad (but not exclusive) Centre of Excellence, bringing your first followers, born digitals into the mix.  Not only will this group provide you with results, they will become your advocates to bring others along with them. Finally, you are ready to create a business movement, and that's when Digital Transformation really starts to happen!

Everything is in a state of constant change: our world, our behaviour as consumers, our daily lives. See the changes coming, assess the changes, act to adapt to those changes, start strong and engage socially and you will be one of the successful businesses of the future. 

These thoughts and musings are taken from previous blogs and Whitepapers created by Mel Ross, CEO Adapt2Digital.

Leading Change as the New Norm: Priority Leadership Attribute for 2015

That everything is changing is understood by most business leaders. That the speed and velocity of change are increasing is perhaps less well understood. Change is no longer about a single project to transform a single business focus area. It is about multiple activities with a horizontal impact across the whole business: and of course, this is happening on a constant basis. As a business leader, you can no longer bring in one expert or group thereof, at one time, to lead one change project. You must now see change as key leadership attribute, adopt an adaptive mindset, encourage adaptiveness amongst through around you, become and embed being adaptive everywhere. 

Leading change as the new norm is a very different concept from the idea that leading change is the new norm.  The first is about consistency, repeatability and forms part of the daily - yes, and we do mean daily - consideration for business leaders and the workforce as a whole.  The second implies something that is done perhaps in isolation, when all the forces are in place and when there is a consensus that a single, possibly large investment project is agreed to be a business priority.

Leading change as the new norm is about understanding that those key forces that once required single project focus, such as a change in customer behaviour or demographic, no longer work. Today change is happening in all these and more areas, all the time.

If as business leaders we do not seek, assess and act on these changes, Darwin’s survival of the fittest comes into play: those that adapt will survive; those that don’t will perish. This is not new in science, of course, and, it’s not new in business.

Back in 2002 J Wilson III published ‘Leadership in the Digital Age’ where he said that it needed new attitudes, skills and knowledge.

This year, 2015, is going to be a defining year. Businesses must have the foundation blocks of digital business in place such as infrastructure and social engagement in order to take advantage of the more subtle technologies like Internet of Things, gamification and virtual reality.

So, if you’re leading change as the new norm, you need simultaneously to imagine, direct and effect constant and multiple change around you.  You also need to build your business on its human aspects rather than on the spreadsheets and numbers you have used up until now. That means thinking about people as a whole, not just statistics, not just your customer, not even audiences.  A really key leadership attribute for 2015 is the understanding of people as participants regardless of who they are or where they sit; either internal or external.

If you are a business leader or aspire to become one in today’s digital world your number 1 priority is to support and nurture the ability to lead and manage change as the new norm for other leaders around you and find ways to empower the wider workforce to do the same. Combine this with business basics mentioned earlier and you will equip leaders and wider teams to thrive in a world that is digital.

It's time to adapt or to become extinct. It's time to get personal. Start strong. Engage socially. 

These thoughts and musings are taken from various blogs and Whitepapers by Mel Ross, CEO Adapt2Digital.

What does Digitally Mature and Adaptive Mean?

What’s in a name? Everything if you want to ensure that you and your business follow the right path to business success.

Why, you may be wondering, are Adapt2Digital concerned about you constantly adapting to a digital world?  Why do we focus on the importance of becoming digitally mature and adaptive? Why do we even use such terms as ‘adaptive’ and ‘maturity’ and ‘engagement’? Because we know that phrases such as ‘doing digital’ or ‘becoming digital’ embed an incomplete understanding of business today; ‘doing digital’ is not enough. Becoming digitally mature and adaptive to a constantly changing digital world is more than about following a process that ends at a final destination.  

The default of a successful business is to be constantly changing, constantly maturing, constantly adaptive, almost without knowing it, perhaps. That’s the language and mind-set of a successful business. That’s the kind of business that’s seeing off start-ups and established competitors, that’s the kind that’s meeting the ever-changing digital needs and wants of customers, the kind, in fact, that’s actually anticipating the demands and desires of all its stakeholders.

Successful businesses don’t do things a particular way because they have always done them that way. They are constantly adapting. They are constantly maturing. They are in a constant state of change.  If you’re ready to join the growing numbers of adaptive and successful businesses sign up for the Adapt2Digital approach here.

Tweet with us on Adapt2Digital Twitter and link up with us on Adapt2Digital: Pioneers of Digitally Adaptive Business on LinkedIn.

What Does a Digitally Mature and Adaptive Business Look Like?

Your toolkit for spotting digitally adaptive and mature businesses in vertical and horizontal markets

We are not a pedantic bunch at Adapt2Digital, but phrases like ‘how to become digital’ or ‘make your business digital’ don’t make good business sense to us. They paint an incomplete picture. Our experience shows that doing ‘digital’ is not enough.  We prefer to make businesses adaptive as well as digitally mature, by building in the ability to, at least keep up with, but preferably to stay ahead, of a constantly changing digital world.  

Change-friendly

What do we mean by that? Well, a successful digitally mature and adaptive business knows that it’s not about being digital but accepting that change as much as digital is the business norm.  The digitally adaptive business views digital change as an opportunity and not a threat.

Engagement with stakeholders

Breaking down barriers by collaborating and communicating with the workforce, has ensured that the C-Suite and managers in a digitally adaptive and mature business spread the message that making the organisation digitally adaptive is not frightening. Instead, it has been explained as a simple and effective means of staying abreast of ever-growing digital needs of stakeholders, whether they are customer, workforce, supplier, or anyone else.  Given that every generation – X, Y, Z, - and any other post-millennial group symbolised by any letter of the alphabet that one can think of – is digital to its toes, the digitally adaptive business, you will find, is recruiting the best people.  

Infrastructure

The entire digitally adaptive business is geared towards digital. Silos are replaced by one, seamless digital organisation. So you won’t find, in a digitally adaptive organisation, separated, isolated and standing proudly alone sales, marketing and customer service departments. The organisation has realised the benefits of understanding all the aspects that affect acquiring, selling to, delivering and retaining customers. People continuously collaborate through technology enabled integration.

Technology-aware

We have placed this lower down in our list because, as we are constantly saying, digital is not merely about technology. Digital leaders keep tabs on technology advances but do not obsess about it. They have established working practices that mean that technology is the enabler by which they have made and continue to make their business digital.

Communication

The C-Suite in a digitally adaptive business does not forget to continue to communicate how the different parts of the digital business keep pace with the digital world and the accruing benefits.  Participation is the word of the decade for leadership in a digitally mature and adaptive business.

Futurism

When looking for your digitally adaptive competitors, customers and suppliers look for a C-Suite where its members show openness to using whatever is required to keep the business digital and where they positively seek out rather than merely welcome ideas from its workforce. An obsession about the future, in terms of emerging technologies that can ensure you keep pace with changing behaviours and needs, is the menu for the day.

Fleet of foot

Long-established companies (or even ones that are a decade or so old) that are not digitally adaptive tend to lumber along. To spot the digitally-active organisation, look for one that is lean and fleet footed even where it faces competition from start-ups that don’t have the overheads that frequently encumber older businesses and organisations.  This hints at the core concept of adaptiveness.

Finance

The CFO and colleagues anchor digital back to the business and prove real, tangible ROI, but acknowledge the value of outcome based reporting and customer centric focus rather than budget focus.

If any of the characteristics of a digitally-adaptive and mature business sound familiar it’s because many are the distinguishing marks of a successful business. You’re not building a digital business; you’re building a successful business that has all the necessary characteristics and qualities to survive and grow in a digital world. Successful businesses don’t do things a particular way, because they have always done them that way. They do them because they make sense in a world that is now built on digital. Now that you’re ready to join the growing number of adaptive, mature and successful businesses, sign up for our approach here.

Tweet with us on Adapt2Digital Twitter and link up with us on Adapt2Digital: Pioneers of Digitally Adaptive Business on LinkedIn.

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.

Leading Change as the New Norm – The Priority Leadership Attribute for 2015

Photo Credit: daDa © 2014

“Things that should happen don’t and things that don’t happen that should”.  Donald Winnicott talking about the early infant development that requires external environmental influences (support, collaboration, nurturing etc) to ‘adapt’ to their world in order to develop the skills for their future path most appropriately.

I can start this blog by listing out the reasons to explain both the need and urgency for business leaders and businesses to adapt to change and adopt the skills to manage change.

The rate of technology, Digital Disruption (I will leave the opinion of that phrase out of this blog!), changes in demographics, consumer demands changing….

That everything is changing is pretty much understood and agreed by most business leaders. What is not understood or outlined with enough clarity perhaps is that this change is both increasing in speed and in velocity – so the urgency is not about change management being a single project where you can procure the services of an expert individual or organisation to effect on your behalf – the urgency is that leading change as an attribute has become arguably one of the most important attributes a business leader should display – and equally change management as a capability and delivery skill at a management level is required to ensure that this change happens.

Leading change as the new norm is very different to leading change is the new norm.  Why?  Because it’s about consistency, repeatability and something that is a normal consideration within the daily life of a leader.  Not something we do in isolation, when all the forces are in place and the consensus is that a single, possible large investment project has been singled out by the business as a priority.

Leading change as the new norm is about understanding that those key forces that once did require single change projects to adapt to the corresponding shift as a result no longer work.  Take technology as an example, or a key customer behaviour change, or a significant change in demographic…we’ve had all of them before and economies and industries have adopted new ways of doing things to address them.  Today we have a different paradigm, we have change happening in each of these areas and more happening all the time, overlapping, influencing, disrupting.  As business leaders, managers and businesses generally, if we do not have the ability to see these changes, have the ability to assess these changes and subsequently act upon these changes as we see fit, then the Darwinism effect comes into play – those that survive will be those that adapt to their environments, those that don’t will perish.

Is it scaremongering to say Adapt or Die?  Is it spin-doctor narrative that talks about the need to be a Digital Leader?  I don’t think so.  So much so that in my previous blog I talk about leadership in a digital age rather than the rise of a digital leader per se.

This shouldn’t be new news to us – as far back as 2002 the following theoretical paper was published on Digital Leadership “LEADERSHIP IN THE DIGITAL AGE” Ernest J. Wilson III

Stating that as we move from an industrial age to a knowledge or networked/connected age Wilson states "Leadership in the Digital Age needs new attitudes, new skills, and new knowledge."

In many respects the honeymoon period is over.  The rise of the CDO and Digital Leader has a place in the business world to transition us from managing single shifts to managing multiple shifts as part of daily life, but the urgency is really to widen the net, to start to build and support these skills and capabilities required to see, assess, act and thrive with change, so that we become businesses that have many adaptive leaders, not just one.

2015 is going to be a big year.  Businesses that haven’t yet grasped the fundamentals of ‘digital business’ are already on the back foot.  The building blocks of a digital business are having the infrastructure and understanding of social engagement, the ability to access and assess data, a move to more agile technology infrastructures and cloud services and of course, an effective exploitation of the mobile opportunity.  Just to be aware of these is not enough anymore, these foundation blocks have to be in place to start to take advantage of the more subtle technologies available like gamification and augmented reality as well as the more disruptive and game changing technologies like Internet of Things, Wearables and Robotics.   Any business wanting to really take advantage of these maturing digital world elements have to have the foundation blocks in place to succeed.  Surely that’s a huge hint to anyone wanting to build a digital strategy.

What does leading change as the new norm really mean – aside from the obvious?  What skills, capabilities and attributes are required?

Put simply, leading change as the new norm requires the ability to vision and direct constant change and often effect multiple change at once.  Leading change requires the ability to address the human aspect as well as the business aspect.  It is no longer enough to lead or manage by monitoring hard numbers; leaders now need to understand the importance of the human aspect more than ever before.

The human aspect of digital business can be thought of in three ways:  Empowerment, Independence & Transparency

Empowerment – the ability to try and test new things, to make decisions based upon the access of data and the understanding of parameters, an understanding of change as an enabler not an inhibitor.

Independence – the ability to self learn, and to grow independently.

Transparency – ensuring that access to data and the communication of intent is a business priority rather than a secondary consideration – letting people know…letting people know becomes the primary consideration for a leader of change as the new norm; a leader in a digital world.

For too long now leaders and managers have built and managed businesses through spreadsheets and numbers.  Now businesses that succeed are being built and managed by a focus on engagement, loyalty and the presence of those leadership attributes described above.

To ensure businesses are able to thrive in a digital world a new breed of leadership is urgently needed.  This needs to happen in two ways, existing leaders must not fear, shy away or ignore the need to do things differently to succeed in different times.  New and upcoming leaders should embrace the generation they belong to and adopt those positive open, social and change blasting attributes in their leadership ethos.

If you are a business leader or aspire to become one in today’s digital world you must ensure that supporting and nurturing the ability to lead and manage change as the new norm becomes your number 1 priority for personal development and the development of those leaders and managers around you.  This coupled with the business basics mentioned earlier will equip any leader or leadership team with the key ingredients to thrive in this digital world.  These are the leaders and businesses that will succeed.  It really is time to adapt or die!

In my next post I will be talking about the maturity of Digital Transformation as it moves from the delivery of a single change project to a constant stream of transformations which we term; Adaptiveness.

Digital Leadership? Or Leadership in a Digital World?

Digital Leadership is a phrase fast becoming a buzzword for more and more businesses and business leaders.

However, the word digital has built an impression or understanding that it’s all about technology.  If you think that you are on a slippery road.  It is as a result of the digital revolution that we need to revisit and rethink leadership, business models and ‘the way we do things’.

But, Digital Leadership is less about a single person and more about bringing together a coalition of power, skill and vision that can collectively start the first wave of transformation.

Why do you need Digital Leadership?  Well we all need to become more digital – not just do digital but be digital and that means technology change, people change and business change…so one person alone doesn’t work.

What does this coalition look like and what do they need to do?

Well as with most transformational change efforts – nothing works without a fully embraced mandate from up on high.  So you need to ensure that the highest level of the business fully supports the effort.  Don’t stumble at this first hurdle, believe me, the effort to secure this support will be the biggest success factor in your business becoming more adaptive, more digital.

Then you need three key skill-sets and people of influence in this coalition: Someone who knows technology, someone who knows communication, and someone who knows about people and culture. Why is this important?  Well digital might not be all about tech but it’s going play a huge part in your transformation efforts – moving to automation, creating collaborative environments, aggregating data to make it meaningful, just having someone who knows what new and emerging tech is out there is hugely important.  This is a person who can show the business the art of the possible to achieve business objectives and meet audience needs. 

Communication is another key area that often get’s ignored when it comes to transformational efforts but it’s vital that there is a communication plan.  Don’t just send an email or have a meeting and think it’s done, and you can’t leave people to their own devices – you need to nurture them, keep reminding them of the urgency of becoming more digital.  There are two key areas that need to be managed; the participation of key people to build credibility and a reason to follow, alongside the creation of conversation throughout the organisation; a focus on sharing and receiving.  And then of course there is the need to address culture – because the way you do things at every level of the business is going to change and only the right mindset will allow for this to happen.

Then you need believers, inspirers, people willing to have a go, test things, try things, learn new things…these are the people that already have the mindset of change.  These people are those who will generate your initial quick wins and good news stories.  These people will create momentum to help move the transformational process along.  Don’t forget them, go out and find them as one of your first key steps – this is your first group of advocates.

Lastly, one of the big outputs of digital transformation is the democratisation of business.  So at this very first and key stage, bring some new and fresh digital native blood into the mix, there is much for us to learn from the digitals, as there is much for the digitals to learn from experience.

What I’ve just described is a really key step in your journey to becoming a more digital business.  You need power at the table, you need capability at the table, you need advocates at the table and some of your newest DNA to help you understand what tomorrow will really look like.

Obviously, I’m only talking about one small item that is needed at the beginning of your journey towards becoming adaptive.  You need to understand where your business sits digitally today so you know where to start and where to focus. 

You need a vision, and rather than a digital strategy sitting alongside your business strategy, create guiding principles that fit with your strategy that can be embedded within the business to help everyone start to become more digital.  You are also going to need some good news stories, most businesses we find have at least a couple of good news stories that can help people see that in some way, shape or form you are already demonstrating success in digital. 

We know the world is changing, we know as consumers we are changing, we know our daily lives are changing.

Digital does have a lot to answer for.  But in a good way.  We now know that things are in a state of constant change and that those who can see change, assess change and act accordingly i.e. adapt to change will be the successful businesses of the future.

Bringing your business up to speed with digital in 2015 really needs to be your number 1 agenda for the New Year.  Create a sense of urgency and start your journey.

The Mavericks Guide to Becoming a Digital Business

You now have to be a Digital Business or at least be considering it otherwise you are doomed for failure. That’s the message coming out of all the large management consultancies and research houses. Act now, act quick, put a huge amount of budget aside for your impending and unavoidable ‘Digital Transformation’.

It’s true. Businesses do need to be thinking about how they are going to address the digital challenge, the increased pace of technology and rising customer expectations have made it so. In fact, if a business hasn’t already put ‘digital’ on the boardroom agenda, they are already way behind the curve.

But businesses don’t need ‘Digital Transformation’. Businesses need to become adaptive. Change is not new, never has been, it’s just that now, change has become so fast, it’s scary, meaning there is huge reluctance to change anything within the organisation that holds risk for the bottom line. And the term ‘Digital Transformation’ has not helped. Wow, do I have to transform everything, all at once and it’s going to cost how much? And it could fundamentally and negatively affect the way the business operates and through a multitude of high profile, failed projects, and the list goes on. Only a couple of weeks ago did Mike Bracken talk about the disillusionment of so-called ‘digital transformation’ due to the failure of long term ‘BIG IT’ contracts within the Civil Service.

It is inevitable that the business world has to embrace digital…every business does, large or small, if they are to survive into the future. And this is not a technology/IT discussion, this is embracing digital across the entire organisation; it’s a change to the business model, the development of people, a shift in culture and the way a business communicates. Digital is affecting every pillar of the business and thus needs to be addressed across every pillar, holistically, to make the most of the digital opportunity. The rewards are proven. There is more research out there than you can shake a stick at demonstrating the benefits, cost savings, revenue growth and increased innovation possible when businesses are more digitally mature. So rather than focus on the obstacles to change, perhaps it’s time to focus on the advantages. 

We have to think differently. We have to take the fear out of digital and provide a means for action rather than just talking all the time. So if Digital Transformation is not the answer, what is?

Here’s our Maverick’s guide to becoming a Digital Business. It is based on the Adapt2Digital: Digitally Adaptive Framework & Methodology™ that helps businesses become adaptive over time. Think of digitally adaptive as taking the best of what a business has today and then looking into the future and pulling both together, in small incremental stages to create meaningful change. Not so scary now is it?

Take the time to understand the difference between technology and digital. Technology has an important and valid place within the organisation but there is a need to change the perception of technology from an internal service provider to a place that can share insight into the art of the possible to create business solutions. Digital on the other hand is about the whole business from the organisation, to the people, to the culture to the wider business ecosystem, it’s about the point of connection between technology, people and culture…and it’s always continuously changing.

It doesn’t matter who in the organisation starts the transition to becoming a Digital Business. The standard interpretation of changing your business to be more digital is starting at the very top. So this is getting someone, generally the CEO to mandate the digital directive. This is not the start, this is actually the tipping point. It actually starts with an advocate, someone who has recognised the digital imperative and can see the business benefit and communicate this upward and outward.

Find your champion. Maybe the advocate is the digital champion but maybe not. If not, find the champion. This needs to be someone who:

• Can talk up to the business

• Who believes and participates in digital

• Has credibility as an individual

• Has courage to challenge the status quo

Build a Business Case for digital. You aren’t going to get anywhere without a strong business case that is bought into but the senior leadership team. Make sure you include a broad assessment of current digital capability and competency across the business and what the effects of the transition could be in real terms.

Find some good news stories. There will be pockets of digital happening in your organisation. Find the good stuff and demonstrate the value of this. Use these as best practice examples, think about how learnings from these initiatives can be repeated, enhanced, and made more of. 

Bring people together. Vitally important. Bring the senior leadership team together and do something with them that shares the business case, that creates digital definition for the organisation, that builds agreement and consensus. Everyone needs to be aligned and committed to the digital cause because it is everyone’s responsibility.

It’s all about lots of little. The business isn’t going to transform overnight. Thinking this would be very unrealistic. Neither do you need big digital transformation projects to adapt to digital. What is needed are as many believers and advocates as possible that can start to seed positive change in many areas and just start small.

Break down the barriers and collaborate. Find some areas where you can collaborate, invite different people to meetings, learn something new from someone. Get away from hierarchy. Businesses in the modern world are not hierarchical; they foster collaboration to enable innovation. Empower people to make data driven decisions.

Make sure you have a framework to track progress. So many times ‘digital’ is happening without a structure to monitor results and progress. A robust framework is needed to ensure you are moving in the right direction. Anchor digital back to the business and find a way of proving real, tangible ROI. This is the only way to ensure digital is seen as impacting positively on the business from a financial perspective.

Take care of mindset. No business can change without the right mindset. A collective digitally adaptive mindset shifts culture. Seek the solution, not the reasons to fail, be an enable, not a blocker and remember that mindset is learned, it is not a given. 

Nobody believed in Steve Jobs when he first took the concept of the personal computer to market, in fact he had to describe it as ‘putting a TV screen and a typewriter together’, which to most was a crazy idea. But as Apple has proven, belief by a few can change the world.

It is time to believe in a new business model, one that is adaptive, one that is not stuck in traditional ways of working and operating. Here’s to the crazy ones…

Six Steps to Becoming a Socially Adaptive Business

We’re now a decade into the social media revolution. And for the past five years or so, many early adopters such as youth brands, artists and the FMCG sector have been using sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube successfully to engage with their audiences.

Yet stubbornly, most organisations have been very slow in waking up to the fact that these audiences have changed. We now have four separate generations of people – Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y and the Millenials, all of who consume the media in entirely different ways. And even within these demographics their habits are constantly changing. For example, over half of over 65s are now on social media (Pew Research Center).

Most marketing and communications strategies are based around a business model dating back to the early days of the internet – or even earlier in some industries! It’s still very much about push marketing, assumptions about audience behaviours not changing and an over-reliance on traditional communications channels.

As a result, social media is often seen as something almost frivolous, which is the preserve of the marketing department, PR consultancy or advertising agency. At a recent Econsultancy round table session which I chaired, it became evident that even well paid community managers of leading UK brands got very little buy-in or support from managers within their organisation.

However, social media not only affects obvious areas such as sales, marketing and IT but it also has large implications for internal communications, human resources, PR, recruitment, corporate governance, supply chain management, customer relations, R&D and even product development. So it is vital that the C-suite and Boards understand the implications of social media.

There is a six-step programme to achieving the desired aim of creating a socially-adaptive business. It isn’t a straightforward process and it won’t necessarily happen overnight, but it could ensure that your business is still here in 5-10 years. Or at the very least, that you can remain ahead of the competition.

The diagram below shows the six steps, starting with an overriding strategy which encompasses any aspects of your business that could in some way be affected by social media. The creation of this strategy can often be painful as it requires a common vision for the business, agreement about where the organisation is heading and unity of approach in reaching out to customers, stakeholders or any other audiences. Now how often do you see that?

Getting the strategy right is vital but so too is having a corporate culture which can support social media. From the management team down to the people in the post room, everyone needs to understand how social media can benefit the business. Already CEOs are being chosen on the basis of how social they are while large organisations are hiring staff who are increasingly ‘customer facing’ not only in the real world but also online. Why? Because people are now permanently connected to the internet and the customer experience can be enhanced or ruined by bad service, whether it is face to face or on a social network. Plus of course, we’re now in an age where everyone is a publisher, including our customers, competitors and staff. So the more people prepared to embrace social, the better.

Next on our corporate shopping list is content. This nebulous concept which is rapidly becoming the most important part of the marketing mix. Even in B2B, senior marketers are now saying they expect to spend a quarter of their budgets on content creation (Content Marketing Institute) while in B2C this percentage is much higher (Marketingland survey October 2014).

With so many channels to manage - in the case of B2C this can be 24/7 - and such a need for quality content, many companies are struggling to meet the demand. Outsourcing to advertising/advertising/creative agencies can be a solution, as can creating internal ‘newsrooms’ to provide a steady source of ideas.

Then there is the question about which channels to use. With so many social networks and social messaging sites now in existence and so many different ‘micro’ audiences, balancing scarce resources with being visible on multiple channels is a constant challenge. The key is to have a strategy which identifies which network is most likely to yield results then monitor the results on a regular basis. This process should then be able to accommodate any ‘new kids on the block’ – Instagram, Pinterest, Ello etc.

One thing is certain though, video content is becoming more and more important, not just for visibility on Google but on Facebook and Twitter too. Cisco estimates that by end of 2015, 86% of all content viewed online globally will be video based.

Creating the content is one thing but managing it is another. Most companies focus solely on pushing out material to audiences. It may sound common sense but social media is about being ‘social’. This means that brands need to listen, respond and engage on social networks and this is very difficult to outsource completely.

As a result, a large number of companies now employ full time community managers to oversee activity on the corporate social media sites. Because they are increasingly being used as networking, business development and customer services channels, you can now see why there needs to be a unified approach to social! PR agencies are great at creating content but they aren’t call centres. Also, creative agencies may come up with wonderfully engaging artwork but their job isn’t to listen out for what your competitors may be doing.

One of the key developments in 2014 has been the inexorable rise in social advertising – particularly on Facebook. Every one of the key social networks now offers some form of paid-for promotions for both large organisations and SMEs. Therefore any company that wants to achieve tangible results on social needs to allocate some form of budget, whether this is spent on creating more accessible content or funding ad campaigns.

Again, many larger organisations may need to outsource this to advertising, media buying or specialist agencies that have the expertise and experience to run multi-faceted campaigns.

The key to social advertising, as with any form of marketing, is to understand exactly who your audience are and what they want. To do so in 2014 requires using Big Data - the final part of the socially adaptive business equation.

With hundreds of millions of conversations taking place every day around the world on dozens of different social networks, it can be daunting for companies to make sense of what is going on around them. Factor in the issue that few businesses actually listen on social and you have yourself a potential problem.

Fortunately there is a wide array of software tools available. These range from free tools such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck or the analytics embedded within the social networks, all the way up to incredibly sophisticated social monitoring tools such as Sysomos or Attensity.

The information that can be mined from analysing sentiment, conversations and trends on social can be critical in determining content, product development, ad budgets and ultimately, future strategy. Which brings us neatly back to where we started.

The question you need to ask yourself is: “How close are you to becoming a fully digitally-adaptive business?” Whatever your answer, we can help you reach your business goals.

Partners and Suppliers in a Digital Age - How Should You Manage Them?

It was really difficult to come up with a title for this post.  Mainly due to the fact that my message relates to any organisation or group outside your organisation that form part of the Customer Experience – so not just the traditional supply chain – but every single organisation that has some responsibility along your customer journey.

What am I talking about?  I’m talking about the importance of the supplier, partner or provider as a key audience within the customer journey cycle.

Often I am faced with a perception that becoming customer centric is all about understanding the customer in order to increase the value of their experience and your engagement with them.   Without question, this is a key part of becoming customer centric but understanding and collaborating with the supplier/partner ecosystem involved in creating the most relevant and meaningful customer experiences requires equal thought and attention.

The digital age has brought with it an unlimited supply of possibility in terms of technology; from apps, to open source through to predictive analytics and social business elements beyond just social media…and the list goes on and on…

As digital opportunities increase, the reliance on suppliers and partners to provide specialist tools and services also increases.  Many organisations even look towards outsourcing as many areas as possible as a strategic business objective.

All this against a backdrop of the Internet of Things only points to a move towards multiple and complex working relationships with people and organisations, which are outside the traditional four walls of business.

Yet, given all this, businesses often look to supplier and partner relationships in a traditional way that limits both the value and innovation which could be afforded with a more collaborative and integrated approach.

So how should you build valuable and effective relationships with service providers and partners outside the traditional controls of the internal business?

Mindset, Visibility, Adaptability and Resilience.  

It is most important that just as the people you work with within the business need to have a team fit and personality fit, so too should your partners and suppliers.  In an ever-complex world where the customer journey is a series of touchpoints that are controlled by different organisations, a mindset fit is vital.  Though the ultimate customer responsibility might fall to you, those suppliers and partners that deliver service, product and experience to your customers must be like-minded enough to support that seamless customer journey.  Furthermore, with the customer landscape becoming more fragmented the need to maintain visibility of all your customers across all touchpoints at all times becomes a science in itself.

The advance of data and analytics have possibly been one of the most important breakthroughs to enable a single customer view, the ability to analyse, engage, understand and better serve the customer throughout their journey from discovery through to loyalty and advocacy.  But when the customer travels through the different touchpoints that are owned, created or part responsibility of a third party, it’s vitally important you don’t lose full visibility of data – we have to find ways to ensure that no gaps exist across all those customer touchpoints. 

This is not always easy and should be something which forms part of the contractual negotiation right at the very start of the business relationship – and even cited within any contract agreements.  Data is the key to unlocking optimal value and insight in the search to create the best customer experiences and achieve business goals.  Don’t throw that vital element away just because of the lack of attention at the first hurdle.  Having full data visibility within the boundaries of compliance and security is a must with all partners and suppliers.

When you put mindset and visibility together you have the component parts for a solid collaborative working environment.  And as the concept of design and innovation becomes less about a siloed R&D department in the darker levels of a business and more about the open, integrated collaborative environment where suppliers and partners become an intrinsic part of product and service development – we need to ensure that we either choose or consciously build this environment with all our suppliers and partners.  To ensure both mindset and visibility are focus points for your supplier partner relationships is hugely important to deliver innovative and effective end to end customer experiences.

Adaptability.  Customer demands are in constant flux, a new app or social platform can take off in what feels like a matter of hours, in particular with the younger digital generations.  And as new features and functions are added to more established digital platforms and products, the consumption habits of the audience changes as a result.  What this means is that the whole supply chain needs to be able and willing to adapt to changes when relevant and meaningful to the customer experience.  Equally, your partners and suppliers should have a good enough focus on the advancement of technology within their specialist area to continually provide the most valuable contribution to the customer lifecycle.  Adaptability is going to be an increasingly important part of supplier partner relationships when it comes to the full customer lifecycle in a digital age.

Resilience – this word is often more likely to be used within the manufacturing context or the more traditional supply chain area of logistics etc.  However, in the digital age having a sense of resilience between all partners and suppliers is really important.  Why?  Well, the concept of test and learn, the idea of experimentation takes resilience to achieve.  There will be tension across the whole customer lifecycle when experimental and concept elements are put in play, but the reward is, as we are increasingly finding, far greater than the risk. 

With changing technologies, with increased connectedness, the increasing demands and expectations of customers all point towards a need to test and experiment more in the name of innovation and ultimate delivery of relevant and meaningful customer engagements and experiences. 

For some time now we have helped our clients understand that beyond the customer there is an audience landscape that requires focus in order to achieve real customer centricity and that’s what we all want right?  The employee, the supply chain and the stakeholder all should have a seat at the table.  So do start to think about your suppliers and partners with our four guiding elements to help you stay in control and better able to provide the best possible products and services to your customers in the most relevant, meaningful and timely way to achieve your business goals. 

But before I sign off, it would be remiss of me not to mention one other audience which is fast becoming a valuable strategic asset to many an organisation – that of the crowd.  Cost efficiencies, User Testing, Collaboration, Co-design, Build and development, even funding; just some of the areas where tapping into the crowd can massively help the business achieve their goals…but that’s a story for next time.

Collaboration & Integration: A Match Made in Heaven

Collaboration has become quite the buzzword within business recently as leaders start to realise one of the future success factors of surviving in the digital age is dependent on enabling a collaborative environment. And this is for many reasons, improvements in communication, an empowered workforce and importantly, the ability to continuously innovate at a time where innovation can mean the difference between business success and failure.

There are many examples of collaboration within business. Google for instance introduced the concept of Google Garage. A space where “Googlers can come together from across the company and learn, create, and make.” Apple has always been known as a collaborative company, as referenced in this interview with the late Steve Jobs where he talks about how the company is organised like a start-up. AMP Bank in Sydney spend time with their employees side-by-side to understand how they work and how new technologies and strategies can enhance their personal and professional lives. Cisco leverages a collaborative environment to crowd source issues and requests, enabling them to find the best and fastest solutions for improved customer experiences.

So we can all agree that collaboration is a necessity. As businesses move to become digital businesses, adapting internally so that functional areas do not operate in silo is a real imperative.

So where does integration come into it? There are many definitions of integration. Here we are referring to integration as systems, as technology that enables collaboration. Interestingly, there are very few examples of businesses that are successfully combining collaboration with integration, which is somewhat odd given the amount of tools and systems that are now available for businesses to utilise. There is very little point investing in a collaboration tool that is never used and in this day and age, there is very little point having a meeting to collaborate on something without the tools to enable further collaboration and effective progress. Time and time again, systems and tools are introduced into the organisation to promote and encourage collaboration yet they fall by the whey side because there isn’t an explanation of why it has been introduced, the reasons for using it and how to use it – therefore you end up with just another platform or tool that becomes a burden for the employee rather than an aid. 

Collaboration & Integration are key parts of a continuous journey, and also key elements of successful digital business. What they require however, is combined focus and a committed driving force to keep both moving forward to generate value for the customer. What is important is understanding the parameters of both as part of a wider digital business strategy, how far it should be pushed across audiences (and by audience, I mean not just employees but customers, supply chain/partners and wider stakeholders). In addition, they require ownership. Who owns collaboration and integration in the organisation? Motley Fool has a Chief Collaboration Officer (CCO) who is charged with making collaboration part of the daily doings of the company. Of course, this responsibility could also fall to another member of the C-suite. So who owns Integration? You could argue this is the future role of the CIO, who historically has been kept at arms length from the senior leadership team. This would make sense given the growing importance of the CIOs role and responsibility in driving the organisation from being a traditional business to a digital business and all that entails. And then of course there is the challenge of bringing these two roles together so that they are not working in isolation. Moving forward, both of these roles will be integral to building a digital culture internally across the wider workforce.

As our working environments change due to the combined forces of technology advancement and customer demand, the need for collaboration and integration to work together will be key. Workers will be spread across many time zones, employee demands will be greater, and technology will continue to advance. In the end, the future workplace will be a digital and analytical environment and businesses should be starting the journey now to put a workplace infrastructure in place that accommodates this – one that smartly enables innovation to increase competitiveness and the bottom line.

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.

Painting a clear picture for your business to thrive in a digital world.

Insights RSS

At last, businesses can join the digital dots and create effective adaptive strategies to succeed in this post industrial world.

It can be argued that where most businesses are today is through no fault of their own.  If you think about the growth and hype around Mobile, Social, Data and Cloud, you’ll find a vendor heavy landscape flocking to provide products and services to specific functional areas of the business around one of the above.  What you find quickly is a picture full of tactical and siloed decisions and strategies that lead to short term gain without really providing solutions to the business which will help them become adaptive and holistically competent to deal with the pace of change and new consumer demands. 

It’s pretty safe to say that the professional services industry, or management consultancies have been slow off the mark to promote and provide services around digital strategies.  Usually when a transformational change happens, a ‘change agent’, there tends to be a consultancy shift towards support services to deal with that change as a result. We might not embrace the traditional management consulting model for a variety of reasons but when they do engage and take note of a shift, the result is copious amounts of surveys and research, swiftly followed by recommendations promoting new models and frameworks to herald the dawn of a new service industry. Yes of course, in this case we are talking about Digital Transformation.

Let’s just take a step back in time to look at how we got to where so many businesses find themselves today, still siloed with presence of digital visible but either ad hoc or tactical at best.  Only a few businesses can really say they are embracing the full potential that digital has to offer the audience experience and the resultant business success awarded to those who can look outward and forward, those who can adapt to a changing environment moment by moment – always refining the audience experience to deliver business objectives.  As an example let’s look at ACME Co. (only because I used to love The Roadrunner on TV!).  As a business they have been adopting various aspects of Cloud, Mobile, Social and Data but mainly in silo; essentially trying to embed channel shift. Why? Because on the surface this seems the best way to cope with the new and evolving environment, especially with lack of understanding or buy in at a senior level.  So, channel shift serves a purpose, providing some evidence of success but invariably the audience experience falls short in specific areas and there is an increasing pressure on internal systems, competency and capability.

Around 2011/2012 a tipping point occurs. For whatever reason, be it market analysis, boardroom buy in, a growing confidence in digital spend – we see the big consultancies officially launch a new service industry; ‘Digital Transformation’. For the first time, a customer-focused approach at a business level emerges and a new mindset and wave of thinking begins to bubble up.  Coupled with the dawn of digital disruption and the millennial consumer, hindsight shows us something huge and globally relevant was taking place – we just didn’t think it was happening to us right?

Since 2012, Digital Transformation has grown exponentially, as a term, as an industry, as a mindset.

But for us the story doesn’t stop there.  A silent shift from consumer to audience has taken place – all driven from the digital opportunity.  What this means is that businesses everywhere must look to define and refine the audience experience across all 4 corners of the business:  Customer, Employee, Supply Chain and Stakeholder.  Dealing with the audience holistically means a pretty big deal for any business small or large, public or private. 

• You need to break down barriers so that the audience journey can be mapped and refined holistically.

• You need to get buy in from the whole senior leadership team, not just the CEO – yes they should endorse and mandate the business wide change but more support is needed to drive it home.

• You need a pretty good situation analysis of your current competency and capability to adapt.

• You must ensure that digital doesn’t become either a point to point change programme or a bolt on to your current business strategy: you want a journey that starts but never ends and a business strategy that embraces digital.

• You need guts. Not just in one person, that’s not enough, find the people with the guts to try, the guts to drive, the guts to risk and the guts to vision a future.

• Don’t think your thinking stops at the business strategy – for this to succeed you need to ensure that there is a strategic focus on culture, which means communications and people. Bring those who lead these areas on board at the start to ensure inclusion, adoption and a basic belief that change for good can be achieved.

Heed this warning:  If you are reading this blog, great, but if you are reading it with a half-hearted attitude you’re likely in trouble already.  If you are still thinking mobile, cloud, social and data, raise the alarm within your business immediately, these are the forefathers of the modern digital business, they are the building blocks of your future so get them right now.  Why the scaremongering?  Well we are fast moving into the next phase of the modern digital business, that of ‘things’ and machines.  Artificial Intelligence and machine learning algorithms are gaining breakthroughs every day. And it doesn’t stop there.  These aspects are already here, around us, part of our lives making connections and creating opportunity, forever new connections that will bare the fruit of a new phase and a new phase beyond that and beyond that.  

During a recent conversation with a global business leader he mentioned that the leaders of tomorrow will be those who can look forward and outward.  This really resonated with us as a team and as an organisation that provides the support to help businesses and people adapt to this constantly evolving landscape of connections, made possible through digital.

Think forward and outward.  Look beyond your current vision to where your audiences will be tomorrow.  As the pace of change becomes ever faster, tomorrow might well be here.

So here is a quick summary of where we think we are today:

1. Businesses are not stupid, they know they need to address the digital revolution but they don’t necessarily know how urgent it really is or what it might look like to do something about it. 

2. The view of the future is already becoming a reality; those who are only addressing channel shift are behind the curve. Just look to Moore’s Law to see that the future is coming so fast, it’ll hit you when you least expect it.

3. Disruptors will continue to enter markets and industries. It is predicted in 10 years, 40% of the Fortune 500 will no longer exist (Source: Socialnomics), so start to look beyond your current line of vision to influences that might impact your very existence.

4. People matter more than ever, but not just what they can do and how they do it, it’s becoming more about how they think and how they feel.  Treat your audiences with the respect you would expect from another human being – that’s the power of digital.

5. There isn’t any area of the current corporate structure that’s immune.  This revolution doesn’t discriminate it will demand change across every industry, every size of business, private, public and charity…it really will turn into a Tsunami.

Maybe it really is about adapting or dying...

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

A Digital World is a Connected World

We live in an always-on world. The hyperconnected world is now a reality for us as individuals, as consumers and for all businesses globally. 

Today, commercial wireless signals already cover more of the world’s population than the electrical grid (KPCB), and the number of connected devices around the globe is expected to hit anywhere from 50 billion to a staggering one trillion in the next five years. (Flexerasoftware). Cisco estimates that by 2015, the amount of data crossing the Internet every 5 minutes will be equivalent to the total size of all movies ever made, and that annual Internet traffic will reach a zettabyte – roughly 200 times the total size of all words ever spoken by humans.

As individuals and consumers, we are using a growing number of devices and technology enabled means to stay connected and aid our daily lives:

• Globally there are 7 billion mobile phones, 1.5 billion of these are smartphones. There were just 12 million mobile phone users 23 years ago (mobithinking.com)

• We spend nearly 40% of our Internet time on our mobile devices (marketingland.com)

• 41% of households worldwide are connected to the Internet (ITU)

• 50 billion Apple and 48 billion Google Apps have been downloaded (Forbes)

• Worldwide, mobile app users are expected to reach 4.4 billion by the end of 2017 (mobithinking.com)

• 80% of consumers plan to participate in mobile commerce within the next year (inmobi.com)

• Even 38% of 2 year olds use mobile devices (entrepreneur.com)

• The most frequently used app in the world is Google Maps, followed by Facebook and YouTube (Mashable)

• In 2013, mobile consumers owned an average of 3.9 connected devices (jiwire.com)

For businesses, the hyperconnected world brings both challenges and opportunity. The challenge is maintaining relevance, success and continued growth in the face of rapid change. The opportunity is the ability to innovate, to adapt, to increase or maintain competitive edge. In the mobile space alone, customer trends and expectations are forcing businesses to think differently and adapt to the changing environment:

• 30% of mobile shoppers abandon a transaction if the experience is not optimised for mobile (mobify.com)

• The majority of enterprises are creating business apps for both consumers (60%) and employees (56%) (IDG Enterprise)

• 80% of consumers plan to utilise mobile commerce in 2014 (inmobi.com)

• For every 100milliseconds in load time, sales decrease by 1% (mobify.com)

• 57% of mobile customers will abandon your site if they have to wait 3 seconds for a page to load (Akamai)

Due to the speed of innovation and the multitude of technology solutions, platforms, devices and content offered to the consumer, life has fundamentally changed and it has changed quickly. We have new ways to socialise and converse with friends, new ways of buying and selling, TV is no longer linear and is consumed across multiple devices at any time of the day (to name but a few advancements). This means that businesses are starting to innovate and new start ups are popping up all over the place, offering a quicker, faster, more convenient solution to the market, take Airbnb for example, who connect travellers with renters of rooms, only 3 years old yet they have facilitated over 2 million nights of lodging in over 19,000 cities worldwide all through their cloud based online platform. Their model is set to rock the hospitality industry and a demonstration of how in such a short space of time, disruption can occur. And it can happen to any industry at any time. We’ve seen it with music, with publishing, with media, every business is now affected by the connected world and the opportunities and challenges it brings – ask any student these days and they’ll probably tell you they want to be an entrepreneur, before going home to build a website or an app or work on a genius idea that is devised and delivered through the use of digital technology.

And there are more and more digital forces for businesses to get to grips with. Mobile, Social, Cloud, Big Data, more and more devices, connected homes, Internet of Things, Internet of Everything, Digital Natives, Apps, security risks…it really is a digital vortex out there and businesses need to move fast, there isn’t time to bury heads in the sand and hope it will all go away, because quite frankly, it is only going to get ‘worse’.

For those who are able to understand and tackle head on this new and continuously evolving landscape, there is huge potential. To reach new customers, to innovate products and services, to see increased profits and discover new revenue streams and even be a disruptor themselves. However, businesses need to adopt a new mindset, build a digital culture, start to address current digital strengths and weaknesses and map this to the landscape and their audiences. This will lead to change but the change needs to be manageable and align with the business framework in order for it to be effective. More importantly, adapting to digital needs to be performance base, have clear expectations and demonstrate results. All too often, businesses jump in with a ‘mobile strategy’ for example without any thought to the outcome or needs of the business and their customer.

So perhaps it is time to recognise this exciting, digitally connected world that we now live in and do something about it.

Stacey Perry

adapt2digital.com

#digitallyadaptive

Additional Sources: Akamai. The Hyperconnected World: A New Era of Opportunity.

“They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” – Andy Warhol

There are various definitions of culture; human achievement regarded collectively, the ideas, customs and social behaviours of groups of people, the attitudes of a particular social group for example.

Culture within an organisation is defined and structured through values, vision, ways of working, beliefs and habits, all of which are taught to be adhered by employees to ensure interaction with others, internally and externally is ‘on brand’ and the right decisions are made. But culture can be conflicting, humans are all different and instilling a desired culture within an organisation can be challenging, particularly if employees do not or are unable to believe in it.

Even more challenging is this move to embracing a ‘digital culture’. More and more we are reading about, experiencing and hearing about how businesses now need to have a digital culture, a digital mindset embedded through all departments and all personnel in order to remain at the top of their game.  And I believe this to be true, but what does having a digital culture actually mean and how do you get one?

Key aspects of a digital culture include:

• Decisions are data-driven, not opinion driven. Ideas are tested and decisions are made based on real evidence.

• Being customer-centric. There is a focus on the customer and what the customer needs and wants across all departments.

• Transparency. Data is available across the business, commercial performance is shared.

• Collaborative. Teams work together, this also means people working together who may not have done so in the past.

• Employees are empowered. They are given permission to try and to fail and try again. Ideas can come from anywhere.

• There is a hunger. A hunger to learn, a hunger to be more agile in processes and delivery, to pass on knowledge to others and to be willing to change at the drop of a hat.

• Working tools are agile and tend to be cloud based.

• Office space is open and provides areas for conversation and idea generation.

World class digital organisations have an inherent digital culture, embed knowledge, reward innovation and recruit the best digital talent. Most importantly, they are driven by leaders who commit to and support that taking risk is the key to success.

The issue today for many businesses, in particular big business is that they lose sight of their customer. Too many people operate in silos, there is no single-customer view and existing work environments inhibit collaboration. When comparing this to organisations that do have a digital culture, who can respond to change faster and have a inherent focus on the customer and on data, it is a no brainer that there will be winners and there will be losers. Look at P&G, they invested in becoming more agile with better tech integration, improved business data and a reduction in micro-management. In 2013, they reduced manufacturing costs by over $1.2bn and increased productivity by 7% P&G’s 2013 Annual Report and compare this to Kodak, Blockbuster, HMV who have failed to change in the face of disruption and well, you get the idea.

Embedding or moving to a digital culture cannot be achieved overnight. It cannot be bought online (unfortunately!).  Businesses are divided, some people will embrace change and look forward to the future, others will cling on to their traditional ways of thinking and working.

“Culture is not something that changes with a memo from the CEO or with a town hall meeting. It has an intangible quality that requires sensitive nudging and precise targeting of new key behaviours, which is why changing culture takes time.” Booz & Co

However, with small steps a digital culture can be achieved:

• Look for those in the organization who have a digital mindset. There will always be pockets of people that can be ambassadors for the cause, they can be the catalyst for changing the thoughts and ideas of others.

• Ensure the most senior execs support and demonstrate buy-in to the digital culture. This cannot be done by words alone, changes in practices and rules can establish this over time.

• Role definitions. Changes in job descriptions can make employees feel more at ease and comfortable with how their specific role will evolve moving forward.

• Reward and incentivise. Find new ways to do this that incorporate both analogue and digital.

• Encourage innovation and ideas. Allow staff a percentage of time away from their day job to think about initiatives that could benefit the company and the customer.

• Encourage and provide digital knowledge. This could be from external training, educating the workforce on how to access information digitally, taking part in learning communities.

• Bring people together to understand the customer. Your customer is always changing, find ways to consistently know who they are, where they are and what they are doing.

The first stage though is discovery. Understand what the culture of the business is now and how you want it to look in the future. You will find there are many strengths in the existing culture as well as weaknesses. A step by step approach that involves the entire business will ensure that abandoning the old is not a scary proposition. Change is needed and it is needed now. Exciting isn’t it?!

adapt2digital.com

#digitallyadaptive

Sources: Econsultancy.com, Bearing Point: Becoming a World Class Digital Organisation, Booz & Co. Building a Digital Culture, CIO.com

What does it mean to be Digitally Adaptive?

Let’s not be fooled.  Digital Transformation is the current buzzword amongst consulting products and services worth $2.65bn in 2012 alone.  But Digital Transformation is not new.  It’s been around for decades, thin client, launch of the App store, and launch of the iPhone then the iPad.  Every time a major technology development occurs that impacts the way we do things, it creates opportunity for consulting services to be sold.  Services to help businesses address that change. 

Today is different; today is unique.  There isn’t just one change happening, there are multiple things happening at the same time; Mobile, Cloud, Social, Big Data, Internet of Things.  Secondly, those changes are in constant flux and constantly evolving.  Big Data is accompanied by Fast Data, Internet of things is morphing into the Internet of Everything, what was social media is now evolving into social business. And the list goes on and on.

Businesses do not want help addressing one digital instance of change.  They want a way to be able to constantly monitor and adapt to changes relevant to them, when it’s relevant to them.  This is what we at Adapt2Digital call becoming digitally adaptive.  This is the most important business imperative to happen this side of the launch of the web 25 years ago.  

Humans are becoming more connected to and through machines.  Machines are becoming more connected with other machines.  The world is moving fast towards 100% connectedness.  The business impact of this increasing connectedness makes it vital for businesses to monitor change against their own capabilities and objectives to ensure survival.

It is an inconvenient truth - but a truth all the same. The question is, when will businesses stand up and take notice?