Identifying the Knowledge and Skills in Your Organization to Support Your Digital Transformation Journey

This post is part of our continuing series, Your Guide to a Successful Digital Transformation.

Having the right Knowledge and Skills in your transformation office is essential to the success of a digital transformation and the critical skills are dependent on the value drivers of your digital transformation journey. As you define your digital transformation strategy, consider these four key areas to understand the knowledge and skills level within your organization.

Do we know the knowledge and skills we already have access to within our organization? Who are our known innovators?

Almost every organization includes individuals who continually look for ways to improve operations and are eager to spearhead new projects or activities that will lead to these improvements. These innovators make up the core group of people who will help drive the success of your transformation initiative and often have an eclectic set of valuable skills from programming, to historical knowledge of how to critical data relates, to data visualization. Your strategy should include identifying these individuals and supporting the development of their natural inclination for improvement.

Does our transformation team have a “Design Thinking” mentality?

This broadly accepted methodology, which was developed by a design consultancy firm (IDEO), encourages innovation and collaboration. It does so by framing problems in ways that identify the key source issues and iterating designs to resolve the known issues and identify potential new issues.  It gives the stakeholders a framework that encourages innovation and non-traditional solutions. Innovation frameworks like this one are critical to fledgling innovation programs because the framework gives the teams support and confidence as they work through problems and solutions.

Is our workforce technologically enabled?

Consider the learning curve of many of your users and account for the time it will take to engage them in a technological capacity. This can also be an opportunity to integrate automation and analytics early on since many of these users will not have the habits ingrained by long years of use. For example, consider a manufacturing line that uses manual route cards transitioning to a digital route card system that automatically provides a data stream for variance accounting and automates the shipping process. The learning curve would be about the same as one that is adding only the data stream for variance accounting and automatic shipping.

Do we know which skills we need for our digital transformation?

Using the three pillars (Data Governance, Process Automation and Analysis and Forecasting) as a guide, determine which activities will provide the greatest value to your organization. Your strategy should include the skills that are critical to the support of that pillar. For example, a strategy focused on data governance in an Azure environment should focus on skills related to database architecture, experience in the Microsoft stack, and creating efficient data pipelines rather than experience in RPA solutions or data visualization software.

For information about how we can assist in your organization’s digital transformation, contact us. We are here to help.

©2022