People and culture are perhaps the essential components of this digital transformation journey. Unfortunately, many are not paying enough attention to these areas. The stops along this section of the journey include leadership, digital skills and culture.

Digital skills

If your organisation is at the very beginning of the digital transformation journey, chances are current structures, processes and general ways of working might not have been designed with digital in mind. Once the leadership creates and shares the vision of the new digital future, analysis will identify the gaps that exist to build and use this new infrastructure. Globally, research indicates that the lack of digital skills was one of the significant causes of the failure of digital transformation projects. Sadly, most small to medium-sized businesses do not have the necessary digital skills to help effect the change and, equally important, to maximise the use of new digital capabilities as they are enabled.

Skills in the IT department

In our Caribbean markets, most small to medium-sized companies do not have, nor can they afford a full department of IT professionals required to support a growing business. Once the leadership shares the vision of the digital future, skills gaps will be discovered. Too many executives believe that “the IT guy” can do it all. After a few false starts, and many bumps in the dark, the truth will come to light — the necessary digital skills are NOT present. This discovery should come much earlier in the process and a plan created to either train, hire or partner with an organisation to bring in the needed skills.

Digital skills in the business

We have been asked to explain the difference between digitalisation and digital transformation. The most straightforward answer is that digitalisation is the implementation of new digital technology in the organisation. Digital transformation is how the organisation leverages and successfully maximises the value of this new technology. Here we are talking about the general business users. Have you done any research into the digital skills you will need in your business? The findings may surprise you. Your company or industry may not be attractive to the talent you seek. Hence, the need to develop a plan early enough to ensure that you get the right people resources to implement effective digital strategies.

Next week we look at culture.

Trevor Forrest is Founder and CEO of 876 Technology Solutions. Christopher Reckord is CEO of Managed IT services provider tTech Limited. Collectively, they have approximately 80 years of experience helping organisations of varying sizes procure and implement information technology solutions and transform digitally.