What it meant to be a “digital company” ten, or even five, years ago, is completely different from what it means today, and into the future. Based on a thought-provoking forum held, organised by the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, on Strategic Digital Leadership, we outline three learnings from that session.

 

For its ninth staging of its annual roundtable, which was on the theme, Strategic Digital Leadership, the Mona School of Business and Management (MSBM), at the University of the West Indies (Jamaica campus), invited a wide cross-section of Jamaican business leaders to a breakfast forum held yesterday 21 June 2018. The speakers, who were from the private sector, academia, policy and regulation, all agreed on the pervasiveness of technology, and the need for organisations to not only embrace technology, but to position themselves to harness it as a tool to aid their strategic transformation and continues relevance.

The presentations highlighted many global and local (Jamaica-based) tech trends, plus the results of global and local surveys on digital leadership. The presenters also shared  some recent initiatives that organisations have implemented that have helped them to become more efficient and effective, by more fully embracing technology and adapting it to their needs. However, ultimately, the purpose of the forum was to help businesses get a better understanding of what they should be doing to improve their strategic digital leadership. We have thus tried to distil the nearly four hours of discussions into the following three takeaways.

The role of the CIO and how businesses interact with technology has changed

Larry Quinlan, Global Chief Information Officer of Deloitte, highlighted the changing role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO). The post, CIO is relatively new, but has evolved from the Data Processing Manager position of the 1970s, and the Director of IT of the 1980, where the individual would be a glorified technician or IT manager. However, the CIO role has evolved to the point where he or she is guardian of an organisation’s  digital strategy, and must deliver on five priorities:

  • being a trusted advisor
  • fostering a modern IT organisation and operating model
  • demanding operational excellence
  • encouraging disruptive technology adoption
  • ensuring value creation and competitive advantage.

Mr Quinlan also noted that a shift has occurred in how companies purchase digital solutions. Traditionally, a business would make all of its purchases from just one vendor, and reminded us of the saying, “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM”. However, now, solutions are being purchased from several vendors, resulting in a more complex decision-making and buying experience.

It perhaps should not be surprising that the Deloitte purchasing complexity observation was echoed in a recent survey of Jamaican businesses, conducted by Dr Maurice McNaughton (MSBM) and Professor Evan Duggan (University of Alabama. For a question asked on what barriers are impeding them from taking advantage of digital trends, the top response was that there were “too many competing alternatives”. In other words, organisations are being crippled by the plethora of choices – digital solutions – that are available.

“There’s a difference between knowing the path and walking the path”

However, as Mr Quinlan shared, based on feedback from Deloitte clients, organisations want to move from ‘doing digital’, to ‘being digital’. Although the difference may seem subtle, as our quote from the movie, The Matrix, emphasises, the realisation of the latter requires a fundamental shift in the organisation’s culture, which must be supported by the requisite systems and processes. To that end, Mr Quinlan highlighted four characteristics evident in digital enterprises that will lead them to being digital:

  • embracing risk
  • valuing experimentation and speed
  • organising themselves (and their teams) for collaboration, and
  • making data-driven decisions.

The tech team can no longer be the only tech-savvy people in the organisation

Finally, within many organisations, especially in the Caribbean, employees are intimidated by technology. Further, although they might be considered ‘computer literate’ – meaning that they know the basics of operating a computing device, and how to use certain software applications – they would not be considered tech-savvy.

Having said this, people are likely to argue that to be tech-savvy, which means being “well informed or proficient in the use of modern technology” (Source: Oxford Living Dictionaries), might be tantamount to having another full-time job in an area that is not their specialty. However, in order to more fully develop a digital culture and digital mindset within an organisation, the ability to ‘think digital’ can no longer reside in only a few individuals, such as the CIO, or the IT team. It thus underscores the importance of digital literacy – which is considerably different from computer literacy, and more importantly, is no longer enough in the current and future digital space.

 

Image credits:  rawpixels (Pexels);  ICT Pulse