What Skills Do You Need to Drive Your Digital Transformation?

Digital,Transformation,Concept.

Your Strategic Options to Acquire Digital Talent

The need for rapid digital transformation has never been greater. Yet a lack of skilled candidates is holding you back. This is what a survey of 1,500 decision makers in global enterprises found in mid-2020.

To combat this problem, we suggest you be clear on the skills you need to drive your digital transformation. By doing this, you can compose a strategy that precisely targets the talent that possesses those skills.

The Digital Skills Shortage Is a Threat to Your Business

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need to digitalize your business. More of your staff are working from home. Your customers are, too. Even as vaccines are being rolled out, we still live in an uncertain world.

You’ve done well to get to where you are. You weren’t prepared for the crisis the pandemic caused. Now you must go further, to enhance your business and ensure you don’t fall further behind your competition.

What Are the Most In-Demand Skillsets for Digital Transformation?

When considering the skillsets needed to deliver digital transformation, it’s necessary to consider the evolution of the business environment and the markets in which you operate. Research from Gartner shows that non-tech companies are hiring three distinct skillsets:

1.     Artificial Intelligence

Deployment of AI can help you to increase efficiency, reduce costs, improve your customers’ experiences, and deliver higher revenues.

Smart technologies such as natural language processing and machine learning can be embedded into your processes and products, automating routine processes, and helping to avoid human error. The greatest advantage is often produced when companies empower humans and machines to work together.

2.     Robot Process Automation

Automating business processes help you to develop better solutions, transferring human effort to robots and allowing your human resource to work more creatively and innovate more successfully.

Employee costs fall, the potential for human error decreases, speed of processes increases, and you receive higher-quality and higher-quantity data. RPA also improves your scalability, allowing you to react more effortlessly to changing market conditions.

3.     Data Science/Data Analytics

Your business collects masses of data, and as the benefits of AI and RPA start to flow, the amount and rapidity of this data will increase. This data has enormous power to direct better decisions, develop more relevant products and services, and reduce costs of experimentation.

How to Staff Up for Digital Transformation

As your digital transformation advances, the skills needed will evolve as the business evolves. Therefore, the three skillsets highlighted above are a start point in your transformation journey. Of course, your journey will also be unique to those being executed by other businesses.

To ensure that the talent you employ remains aligned with your evolving processes and team structures, you will need to take a strategic approach that includes:

  • Moving away from traditional hierarchical structures to roles defined by the skills required
  • Developing team fluidity to allocate skills and resources based upon current work
  • Devolving decision-making processes
  • Improving your ability to forecast evolving roles and transitions
  • Training existing staff in new technologies
  • Developing new roles as your digitalization evolves your business model

In essence, to compensate for the lack of digital skills in your business you must either:

  1. Move people between teams fluidly, which may disrupt the original team, runs the risk of damaging employee satisfaction, and reduces the impetus of others to develop their own skills
  2. Spend time, energy, and money on developing your existing employees – with no guarantee that they will stay
  3. Hire flexibility of talent externally to your company (outsourcing)

Accelerate Your Digital Transformation

The first two of the three strategies outlined above suffer from several disadvantages. They are either costly or disruptive to team morale, can deter people from developing their own skills, or encourage your people to move on. Further, digital transformation requires such rapid advance in digital skills that you could find your people are continually operating ‘behind the curve’.

Outsourcing, and partnering with a business whose entire model is predicated on supplying skills to their clients based on current and evolving needs, can help you develop your digital capabilities with greater agility and at a lower cost than hiring talent directly.

With access to some of the most talented contractors and consultants in the digital space, TotalTek partners with businesses like yours to develop rational, forward-looking, and outcome-focused, agile digital transformation that is both cost-efficient and business-effective.

To discover how you could benefit from the TotalTek advantage, contact us today.