by Tim Hughes | @Timothy_Hughes | LinkedIn
It’s a great question.
So many times we see people embarking on digital transformation and really it’s an IT change or a systems change. We take our old accounting system or our old CRM or our old human resources system and buy a new cloud one and somehow we think this is digital transformation. It isn’t. It’s buying new cloud IT system.
Yes, I get that the new cloud based IT probably looks better, is cheaper and does not need armies of IT people to support it. But you are still running the same processes and your people have the same level of digital skills.
But how do you measure “digital”? How do you measure “digital” capability?
I used to work for a company were the assumption was that there were no digital capabilities internally, they “had” to be external. Regardless of if this was the right policy and or discriminatory, wouldn’t it be great if you could measure “digital”?
Wouldn’t it be great of there was some core competencies that you could measure? You knew what was “best practice” and the “standard” you could measure against this and then provide a coaching journey to match each person.
The great thing about digital is that it’s the same regardless of individual contributor or leader, we all have to be digital and we all need to go on some sort of journey. Regardless of which if we are running the Twitter account for the local sports club or we are a total digital novice.
Being able to plot people’s “digital” skills has an impact to a companies overall digital capability, ability to achieve its transformation goal. There will also be revenue benefits.
If we take sales for example, there are now clear digital programs that can transform the team to enable great revenue achievement and competitive advantage and at lower cost.
Digital measurement will also have many spin off benefits:-
- Screening of job candidates based on current digital competency
- A clear development path for new hires and on-boarding so they meet their digital probation
- Strip out risk and cost of recruitment
- visibility of leadership ability to transform
- Reduce costs in certain aspects of sales, marketing, human resources and customer services etc
Here at Digital Leadership Associates (DLA) DLAignite.com we have been able to take before and after snapshots of our transformation and we understand what is best practice. We are therefore, able to take you current staff, employees, partners, resellers and measure their current digital capability and plot that against the certified standard. We are then able to provide a training and coaching profile to get them (assuming they are below the standard) to get them to be best practice or above.
People who read this article also read these:
https://dlaignite.com/what-can-the-beatles-teach-us-about-social-selling/
https://dlaignite.com/taking-action-often-equals-success/
https://dlaignite.com/how-not-to-run-social-media-transformation-strategy/
