No time to stand still

Europe is fac­ing wide­spread dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, dri­ven from mul­ti­ple angles – star­tups, blue chips want­i­ng to nur­ture inno­va­tion, inde­pen­dent tech­nol­o­gy hubs and con­sul­tan­cies all chas­ing a slice of the pie.

And what an oppor­tu­ni­ty it is. With the excep­tion of dig­i­tal heart­lands, such as Lon­don, Stock­holm, Berlin and Madrid, much of Europe is drag­ging its feet in terms of embrac­ing dig­i­tal. Accord­ing to McK­in­sey, if all Europe’s lag­gards dou­bled their dig­i­tal efforts, €2.5 tril­lion could be added to the continent’s gross domes­tic prod­uct by 2025, boost­ing GDP by 1 per cent a year over the next decade.

So how do we get there? Who do we need in the dri­ving seat?

Accord­ing to Clare Hill, man­ag­ing direc­tor at glob­al change man­age­ment busi­ness Sys­doc, dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion needs to come from the top down.

Open-mind­ed lead­ers are essen­tial, not just to recog­nise the ben­e­fits that come with embrac­ing change and hav­ing the con­vic­tion and grav­i­tas to engage their man­age­ment teams, but because with high­er dig­i­tal uptake comes greater trans­paren­cy and this can be a dif­fi­cult hur­dle to over­come.

“Not every­one ‘gets it’ because in under­go­ing dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, your organ­i­sa­tion becomes more trans­par­ent. In break­ing down those tra­di­tion­al pow­er bases into a more agile, open organ­i­sa­tion, what you can find is, while some with­in the organ­i­sa­tion will want to dri­ve dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, some­times man­age­ment can become quite uncom­fort­able,” says Ms Hill.

While the rise of the chief trans­for­ma­tion offi­cer (CTO) or chief dig­i­tal offi­cer (CDO) might be per­me­at­ing most sec­tors, hav­ing a sin­gle evan­ge­list is just the begin­ning.

Clare John­ston, co-chief exec­u­tive and founder of exec­u­tive search firm The Up Group, says the CDO is just the tip of the tal­ent ice­berg.

“To real­ly dri­ve dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, CDOs are hir­ing data sci­en­tists, ana­lysts, design­ers, user-expe­ri­ence experts, prod­uct man­age­ment, engi­neer­ing, online and dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. Those are the sorts of skills and tal­ents in demand because often tra­di­tion­al organ­i­sa­tions have nev­er done prod­uct devel­op­ment, they’ve only had an IT depart­ment.”

Hir­ing the tal­ent is one thing, but embed­ding it across the busi­ness is the next chal­lenge.

Sean Corn­well, CDO at Trav­elex, heeds cau­tion to com­pa­nies whose dig­i­tal hub oper­ates as a silo, sug­gest­ing it is too easy for an organ­i­sa­tion to reverse on its dig­i­tal jour­ney.

“You need to make dig­i­tal rel­e­vant to the whole organ­i­sa­tion. If it is just the cool kids sit­ting in the cor­ner, it’s very easy to turn your back,” he says. “Where­as embark­ing on a ful­ly inte­grat­ed end-to-end change pro­gramme, incor­po­rat­ing data sci­ence, human resources, finance and the whole organ­i­sa­tion­al struc­ture, not just by par­tic­u­lar prod­uct lines, this is how you can dri­ve change through the entire com­pa­ny.”

Mar­ry­ing the tra­di­tion­al with the more dig­i­tal-savvy tends to work; Ms John­ston says being sec­tor-agnos­tic is the favoured approach.

“We rarely, if ever, source just from one ver­ti­cal,” she says. “We are always sourc­ing dig­i­tal tal­ent across sec­tors and that is def­i­nite­ly a fea­ture of dig­i­tal as opposed to more tra­di­tion­al hir­ing.”

She points to more tra­di­tion­al sec­tors, such as finan­cial ser­vices, which are hir­ing in from more cre­ative, tech-savvy, con­sumer-cen­tric indus­tries.

“You’re try­ing to pro­vide solu­tions for engag­ing with cus­tomers or syn­er­gies around prod­uct, not solve the domain exper­tise. Whether it’s finan­cial ser­vices, retail or trav­el, they will already have that with­in the organ­i­sa­tion,” says Ms John­ston.

“Where­as if a retail­er is try­ing to dri­ve vol­ume and user expe­ri­ence, that might come from online trav­el, finan­cial ser­vices, gam­ing… the list goes on.”