Behave, Deliver and Grow Like A Digital Company

Delivering digital interfaces to your organisation's customers, partners and employees is no longer optional. It is now essential for long-term effectiveness (and survival).

But this means unlocking the data, systems and functionality your business operates with and exposing this both internally and externally to meet increasingly shifting needs. But it is not easy... hardly any sizeable company has an entirely blank slate to work from. Legacy applications, processes and thinking tie any business down so that it can work well. But it is these very constraints that often limit speed and agility, which are needed to succeed now.

Digitally enabling your business means changing the way you behave, deliver and grow.

Behaviour:
Being customer focused means creating a better customer experience that can win and maintain custom in the competitive digital landscape. It also means understating and controlling your data, so you to make informed decisions quickly based on what you are observing or being told.

Delivery:
Start by using new platforms, tools and methods to build products quickly, plus then to evolve them rapidly over time. If you think your quarterly website functionality is fast now, consider that over 7 years ago Amazon stated it makes changes to production every 11.6 seconds (it may even be faster now) and Facebook releases to production twice a day.

Growth:
Don't be afraid to unleash the creativity and innovation within your boundaries to help you build. Employees must be part of the Digital journey (not observers) and everyone, not just your test manager, must work towards the continuous improvement of products and services.

Digital Agility Needs A Digital Core

The ability of any organisation to remain flexible and adaptable to changes in market conditions, improvements in technology and evolving customer needs is now becoming essential. Outdated business models, approaches and products & services no longer keep a company competitive and ultimately successful.

Having the ability to swiftly deliver and manage rich online experiences and digital functionality across multiple channels and touch-points is almost mandatory now.  But this requires a core digital core architecture that allows Information Technology providers (either in-house or as vendors) to respond quicker and quicker.

Note: It also requires a change in the organisation's mindset

4 Steps To Surviving Digital Transformation

There's no doubt that we are in the middle of a revolution in technology (and therefore the businesses that knowingly or unknowingly rely on technology). As nearly everything becomes software and change happens quicker & quicker, businesses are being asked to transform themselves or be changed

So how does an organisation survive in a world where digital transformation is now the norm?

Embrace technology
It is no longer important for just your company COO or CTO to have all the senior level technical knowledge (although even some of these don't!). Instead other Exec roles such as Commercial Directors and CEOs now need more than just an awareness of what IT can deliver.

Hire the best people

This is very easy to say and often one of the hardest things to achieve. Hiring talented and motivated staff with a personality & approach that matches your company is incredibly difficult. Do you care if they don't wear business attire? Do you mind if they sometimes work from home or outside of the core 9 - 5 hours?  Do you want to pay them what the market (e.g. your competitors) pays?

Hint: If you don't have a huge network of digital contacts, make sure you know and use a very closely aligned recruiter.

Stay fast and agile

Don't just ask your staff to work faster and faster, there is a limit to the amount of output an individual or team can deliver - despite the 'lean' and 'growth' or hack' approaches that seem so popular now. Instead agile delivery needs support from all levels of the business (and it has to be encouraged from the top of an organisation, not just the bottom or the middle layers!).

Have a plan & communicate it
"Failing to plan is planning to fail" is the old maxim. And this is especially try when you are trying to carry out a potential change to your customer experience, back-end business processes and goodness knows what else.  There's also no point trying to carry out a digital transformation in a communication vacuum, it just doesn't work. And I don't mean just communicate with your peers or immediate boss either. Communicate with your board, your minor stakeholders and perhaps even shareholders (and consider communication to your customers too).
Hint: Adopt some of the newer communication, collaboration & project tools. If you don't know what Slack, Trello or even Yammer is.... find out!

Digital Transformation Starts and Ends with a Digital Architecture

The implementation of business transformations within organisations, and especially digital business transformations, is growing to a peak level right now. Chief Information Officers and Heads of Transformation are stepping in to: “digitally enable businesses”, “implement customer self-service channels”, “put the customer at the centre/focus” or just to simply “be more digital” (whatever that means).

However, when you ask these organisations what they are doing to change their internal systems and technical architecture design to facilitate this change, many either go quiet or simply utter something such as “it’s not about technology, it’s mainly about people”… Which I have worked out to actually mean “that technology stuff isn’t as interesting as building something nice & glossy I can show to the board”.

But let’s flip this around for a minute…

Digitally enabling your business usually means taking control of the data in your organisation and enabling it via online technologies. Yes, it does therefore mean the creation of some sort of new database or cloud-based big data lake that can then have modern web services integrated to it, so that some or all of this can be presented within a browser interface.

Implementing customer self-service channels, typically boils down to pretty much the same thing.  Web services and functionality are (securely - obviously) exposed to external customers via web and mobile App channels, so that contact centres or telesales operations can be scaled back or redeployed to different tasks. This also usually comes with a more onerous set of performance & availability criteria, so that a (near) 24/7 service can be offered to customers. However, presenting these services to real users also means that the systems behind-the-scenes need to be able to scale and adapt to changing user demands. Just plugging a rich user interface into a legacy system and hoping for the best is not digital architecture, it is digital anarchy.

Putting the customer at the centre of a business is an easy thing to say and a much harder objective to implement. Most organisations have been created to make money and therefore have lines-of-business designed to perpetuate this purpose. Consequently, technology systems are developed to support these structures and maintain the status-quo, rather than re-orientate things to make sense to the customer or help facilitate their engagement. It might be the ideal, but very few companies actually have end-to-end integrated systems that enable a single customer to be consistently tracked throughout their entire lifecycle. In short, creating technology to enable a customer to be in the middle of a business isn't always as easy as the sales PDF brochure states, especially if you don’t have a decent vision of how these systems need to work together.

So what can a decent technical architecture do for your company’s digital transformation?

It can provide a stable backbone that can support your technical & process change objectives. It can facilitate agile incremental delivery based upon re-usable components. It can help your business grow by supporting integration of other online services, API’s and data sources.

If you’re planning any of this, can you afford to NOT have the right digital architecture?

You Are Not A Digital Transformation Consultant Until....

Take a look on Professional networking social platforms (such as Linkedin) or some job listing websites... and you will see people stating they are Digital Transformation Consultants or something similar. I know.... because I'm one.

But am quite dubious of some of these people, who just seem to be Digital Project Managers or Digitsl Business Analysts who have just given themselves a new title.

So here's my short list of things a person who claim to be Digital Transformation Consultants should have done:

1. Transformed something
   It is pretty obvious to state and nobody is criticising someone for consistently delivering decent projects to scope and budget... but if a person hasn't actually transformed a business, they shouldn't say they actually have.
2. Delivered something
   Yes, I know I said above that just being a Project Manager isn't enough to qualify as being a Digital Transformation Consultant, but neither is not having a hand in the delivery. If a person just comes up with a few lines in a PowerPoint presentation about "a move to digital" or "facilitating self-service" and then moves onto the next job... then that's not enough in my opinion.

I'm sure I'll add to this list in future.

So have I missed anything?

The Digital Dinosaurs Will Die Out

At a recent presentation I talked about how it was still sometimes hard to get senior stakeholder buy-in on digital projects. You'd have thought by now that most senior managers or executive teams would have read the odd press article on digital transformation or listened just enough to an industry consultant on where the future of communications, technology and innovation are taking us.

But no, there are still the digital luddites who want to dig their heads into the analogue sand and fail to grasp that there's a revolution happening in most organisations.

Luckily, like the dinosaurs, these digital deniers will become fewer and fewer until they not just become the minority... but they become virtually extinct. Hopefully!

Digital Transformation Consultancy is Big Business

It seems that every consultancy is suddenly talking about digital business transformation or disruption. And just like the digital disruptors, who have been encroaching on the territory of traditional organisations with new and exciting business models that threaten to eat their lunch... the more traditional management consultants and strategy firms have all been getting in on the digital transformation consultancy game.

 From all the marketing information I've received over the last few months, it would see that you're not a modern consultancy unless you produce a white paper on the subject of Digital Transformation and the 'uberization' of business.

Digital Product Design Has Arrived

The creation of a major product tended to be an opportunity practiced only by a limited number of major organisations. The process of: research & development, manufacturing and distribution was the domain of the large company who had time, budgets and resources available. 

These days getting digital products to market is simpler and speedier by comparison. You don't need huge departments taking ages to create something that either succeeds in a known category or fails & folds without trace... online products can be created, launched and refined much much easier. Product owners can now understand their use and customers quickly... then iterate, improve, evolve and pivot to create something better.

It used to be that a physical product portfolio was pretty much set in stone from day one. Deviating from it was difficult and ground breaking. Now digital products cut across categories and almost defy definition as they merge features and functions from multiple industries all at once.

Everything is now becoming software. Ideas are formed, mashed up and reformed in a single development cycle.. rather than being fixed from one product generation to the next.

• The pace has changed.
• The environment has changed.
• The approach has changed.

And the digital product manager is now able to create wonderfully useful and beautiful products that solve problems and look good too.

It is undoubtedly the age of the digital product and therefore the digital product owner or  designer is in the driving seat for the new economy.

The Future of Digital - thoughts Part 3

Further thoughts on the future of Digital, inspired by the Marketing Society's Digital Day 2015.

Q: What steps do you need to take to sustainably capitalise on the potential of digital within your business?

Collect and use data intelligently:
Whatever you do… ensure that you both collect data correctly and then use it in the best way possible to learn more and maximise value. E.g. Amazon, Google and Uber (as well as Scottish Unicorns: FanDuel & Skyscanner) have all built businesses based on interpreting and using data.

Think like a start-up:
With a small and dedicated team with the right combination of skills, experience and effort you can accelerate your digital output. Even the bigger digital-only businesses now buy smaller start-ups because they have the desire combination of product, skills and  intellectual property or just an idea.

Retain the best staff:
Keep the good ones and encourage the average ones to find out what they are good at. The biggest problems are those who have a misplaced sense of entitlement or use their efforts against others rather than as part of a team.

This is the third post on the Future of Digital, the first can be found here , the second can be found here.

The Future of Digital - thoughts Part 2

Further thoughts on the future of Digital, inspired by the Marketing Society's Digital Day 2015.

Q: How have digital channels evolved and what will be the next big digital trend to capitalise on?

The speed of digital change is getting quicker, learn to deal with it. Focus less on the next technology, device or trend and far more on making sure your organisation can complete (this means being innovative, agile and ready to learn from its mistakes). Apple's slogan at its recent product launch was "the only thing that's changed is everything" and this is right.  5 years ago the iPad launched, now I am seeing tablet numbers decline across a lot of client websites compared to mobile traffic.
More shocking is the fact that 52% of all the companies from the Fortune500 in 2000 now don't exist!


Q: Which new technologies are passing fads and which are game changers for their business?
Over time every technology will eventually become obsolete. NFC, wearables, home thermostats (The Internet of Things) connected to your app, etc. will all one day be the equivalent of the fax machine or the telex. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t investigate some and adopt different ones that either take your on your journey of digital maturity or that meet the needs of your customers.


This is the second post on the Future of Digital, the first can be found here.

The Future of Digital - thoughts Part 1

Following on from some questions I was asked at the Marketing Society's Digital Day 2015, I have decided to write-up my thoughts on the future of digital.

This basically takes the questions I was asked on the day and answers those here.

Q: What are you expecting audience engagement to look like over the next 5 years?

An increasingly demanding and savvy customer:
We have to meet the needs of a customer who more & more have either grown up with digital technologies or adopted them & lives online.  Regardless of channel, location and device the customer now expects a response in the next 3 seconds or they get frustrated, in 5 seconds.... forget it.

Forget about generic messages, they won’t cut it anymore
Sending & providing the same information to everyone is going to have less & less effect, relevancy is key. This obviously creates an issue for those who do not have technology & marketing systems integrated.

Have an acute focus on the customer

Understand each touch-point with your prospective or returning customer and then do everything within your power to minimise their frustrations and maximise their delight. Your website, mobile app, kiosk and should be optimised continually to make them better… if you don’t, your competitors will!

Who Digitally Mentors Your Board?

I see a growing trend in many organisations (both large & small), where an increasing number of staff are becoming digitally savvy and utilising their online knowledge in their daily roles. But who is providing the necessary board-level guidance to a company? Who is equipping your senior team with the skills and advice necessary to drive forward the digital change?

It's not just a case of showing your CEO how to Tweet (her teenage daughter has probably already shown her how to do that) . It's a case of making sure the board and other executives have the capabilities & understanding to be able to seize the power that digital change can deliver.

In my experience & opinion there are four different approaches to providing these skills and experience directly into your C-Suite (A Chief Digital Officer, A Digital Non-Exec, A Change Director or External Consultancy). However each situation is different and in reality your solution to this may be a combination of two or all of them.

Whatever route is chosen, this injection of senior level capability typically has to help the company leaders through a fast-paced delivery of new products, services, processes and technologies.

A New Role to Lead Digital Business Transformation

Corporate change isn't a new thing. Businesses have always had to assess, re-think and re-invent themselves as the world changes around them.

In the past this was a lot easier though. Organisation had years (or sometimes decades) to change their ways. But more recently the cycles of technical innovation have increased, which means the speed of digital change is much quicker. In fact, those in market sectors which were first to be affected by online (e.g. Retail and Travel) had longer to transform their businesses than those being disrupted now - such as Financial Services and some parts of the Transport industry.

So how are some businesses dealing with Digital Transformation & change and how are they setting themselves up to understand and embrace the effects?

1. Create a Chief Digital Office role
Whilst just creating and hiring another senior role in the business might not be everyone's cup of tea, a fair number of organisations have hired (or promoted from within) a CDO to lead up their digital change.

2. Use a Digital-based Non-Exec Director
Although similar to taking on a CDO, a digital-centric NED provides their experience and skills to guide a company board. This role is usually filled by a new Non-Exec Director who has previously had a senior role in digital transforming another business. 

3. Creating a Director of Change

Whilst not exactly a direct comparison to either a Chief Digital Officer or a Digital-based Non-Exec Director role, some company's decide to wrap up their adoption of online tools and processes in a more general senior change position

4. Alternatively they could hire an agency / consultancy.... and most large & well-respected management consultancies are unsurprisingly only too keen to state how they've always been involved in digital transformation and have all the answers....

Digital Leadershift - get ready for a BIG BANG

Transforming your organisation from an analogue dinosaur to a Digital First one is hard, very hard. You not only need the right team of people, the right technology and the will to change internal processes, you need this change understood & supported at the senior level too.

But this isn't about getting the CEO to blog or the Managing Director to Tweet (they should know how to do that already), it is about having the right drive from on-high to correctly sponsor and if necessary push through the required changes that a digital transformation needs.

In short, it needs a shift in the mindset of the leaders to a digital way of working... or a digital leadershift.

However different market sectors and industries are affected by the disruptive effects of digital in different ways. And to illustrate this best, a recent report from Deloitte Digital depicted a 'Disruption Map' that shows the extent to which 17 industries are affected across two dimensions: Degree of Impact (The 'Bang') and the timing (The 'Fuse').

As we know... some industries are already in the middle of their shift. Sectors such as retail (High Street eCommerce has been a beacon of online innovation for the last few years) and Leisure (The consumer travel sector has both blossomed and suffered as online acquisition, customer self-service and aggregation has affected airline travel, etc. - and just look what the likes of AirBnB and to a certain extend Google are doing to the hotel market).

So it is probably no surprise that the leaders in those industries that have already been affected are nearly all digitally savvy. But what about other sectors where the fuse is much longer?

Well in a lot of cases key individuals from shorter fuse industries have moved across to help other verticals understand and manage their way through this disruption. For example, senior staff from tech start-ups are now finding roles in Financial Services and Professional Services.

But other senior managers in those where the disruption hasn't really hit yet are less aware and prepared for the changes that are bound to come. Some may know the Big Bang is coming, but for others it could be a big shock.

Are you a digital driver or just a passenger?

Are you the person leading the digital change in your organisation, or are you just along for the ride?

I've now seen enough digital transformation initiatives to know who is driving from the front and who is not. It becomes quite clear after a while (especially if you are frequently involved with similar types or style of programmes) to identify the leaders and passengers in online change initiatives.

So here are my tips on how to recognise these two types

Digital Leaders:

Typically these people have the vision or initiative to start the digital revolution within an organisation. They may be the technical person that creates the overall enterprise solution that enables a shift away from analogue processes to online ones, or the executive who drives forward the business case or rationale for sweeping channel shift. They may also have a number of different roles across a project, either stepping into different positions where necessary or act as the project manager in the absence of any other leadership.

Digital Passengers:
These are the people that try to align themselves to a digital change project without actually having any responsibility (yet will be first to claim all the credit when change does start taking place). They will understand that 'digital is the next big thing' but will not have had any real experience and yet claim to be knowledgeable when stakeholders or executive sponsors are in the room.They are also most easiest to identify by their repetition of a small number of key facts they have picked-up along the course of the transformation, possibly even getting them wrong over time.
Or put more esoterically... Just because a person is standing in the direction of movement,  it doesn't mean they are actually going that way.

The Lack of Digital Skills – not just a Scottish Problem

A workforce skilled in online & digital tools & technologies is key to developing an organisation’s digital agenda. From the more specialist digital-specific & IT / IS / ICT roles, through to the generalists who may need up-skilling and re-training on average every 3 years… the hiring and development of skills necessary to take forward your online roadmap is not something to take lightly. In fact, the lack of digital skills could be one of the greatest factors in why your digital change strategy fails.

I've previously blogged about the lack of digital skills in Scotland and highlighted the lack of technical, marketing and associated skills (design, user experience, content, etc.) ‘North of the border’ where I live. But this skilled and empowered workforce isn't just missing in Scotland, or even across the UK. In a digital skills presentation today from ScotlandIS, the Scottish IT Trade body, I was actually shocked to hear the fact that there is a shortfall of 1 million digital jobs across the EU.

Scotland is therefore only a drop in the ocean compared to this, with only 10,000 people a year needed here to fill the gap.

So what is being done about it?

• Are schools, higher education and further education producing the right courses and talent?
• Are companies investing enough to drag seasoned employees (who may have previously resisted or ignored the use of digital)?
• Are cities and even governments doing enough to encourage digital enterprise in specific areas that need it most?
• Are boards hiring Chief Digital Officers to champion online excellence?

I fear not.

5 reasons your Digital Change initiative will fail

Nearly every business I now speak to is going through some form of digital change. From smaller organisations assessing the capabilities and skills of their online marketing teams & agencies, through to major multi-nationals looking to transform their IT systems, business processes and customer engagement models around electronic services... the mantra is clear “change or be changed in this new digital world” and I bet yours is very similar.

But transforming your company into a digital leader isn't easy and “becoming the next Amazon” is neither realistic nor practical for most organisations.

To give some ideas of the challenges faced, from my experience here are some areas where organisations fail to get a grip on their digital change:

1. Your delivery model is wrong:
Are you still creating lengthy waterfall project plans more suited to industrial age delivery expectations? The age of agile development and iterative delivery has not only been around for decades now, it has evolved into different flavours and techniques. However, just diving into a fully-blown scrum delivery method without fully understanding the implications this will have on the wider business (and setting these up correctly) is also a recipe for failure.

2. You don’t have the right skills in place

Just giving people new digital job titles doesn't cut it. There’s a talent war out in the wider marketplace right now, where businesses are struggling to hire and keep the right people with the necessary online skills to take big steps forward in technology, marketing and other commercial areas.  Assess what makes your company different and how you could attract and retain the right talent to realise your digital ambitions.

3. You don’t have digital business leadership

Ask yourself who in your company is actually responsible for the ownership and stewardship of your digital strategy? Where are the priorities, road-map and alignment of this digital strategy to the rest of the business set? If this role is not represented at your boardroom table, then you’re probably not taking it seriously enough.

4. You haven’t defined your technical vision and solution

It’s one thing to make bold claims about where your company will be in the future, it’s another entirely to assume it will get there without a technical vision of what the end solution looks like. I don’t think I have ever been on a successful change programme that failed to have the solution architecture for the main features or components defined in advance.

5. Your culture doesn't accept failure

Sure, every company likes to say it gets everything “right first time” but in reality this never happens… there is always room for improvement and things always go wrong. Or in other words “fail forward” by: accepting it, getting on with it, learning from it and move forwards quickly. One client I worked for in the past had a company policy of actually rewarding when a member of staff accepted they had made a failure (and quickly wrote up what went wrong and what they would do better next time). 

Has anyone got any others?

The first 90 days of the Chief Digital Officer

The first ninety days in any job are important. But in such a new and exciting industry as online & digital, the first 3 months in the role of Chief Digital Officer are key.

Here are my thoughts on what should be the main areas to focus of the CDO during this period:

1. Understand the overall business strategy
   Any digital strategy created must be completely aligned to what the business is planning (Commercial aims,  new products, marketing, etc.)
2. Learn the culture
   Every organisation has a "way of doing things" and seeing itself. This doesn't have to perpetuate, but it is good to know what sort of people your peers and team around you do and think. Most important is the appetite for change... which can either be a critical success factor or a big nail in the coffin of a lot of the most forward-thinking digital plans.
3. Set a benchmark
   Recognize which of your competitors (if any) are doing innovative things, or just doing the same stuff but better! 
4. Identify your stakeholders and make friends
   From marketing and customer insight through to IT and Operations... if you are going to be an agent for inevitable change, you will need to build allies first.
5. Research your customers
   It's no good setting yourself up to digitize everything if that's not the correct way forward. And it's no good rolling out smartphone apps if all your potential business is using tablets. You don't have to know everything about every one of them, but being able to classify and segment them into target audiences will help you create the most relevant products and experience for them.
6. Build your vision
   Create an idea of what success looks like. What is the end game of all this change and how does it help the user and company? (Tip: Then give this vision to your strongest critic and ask them for feedback - this will iron out a lot of the wrinkles)
7. Create the roadmap
   Draw up and digital roadmap of short and longer-term projects & tactical changes that move the organisation forward towards your vision. 
8. Justify investment
   Where necessary develop businesses cases that explore the investment required to realise the roadmap.
9. Deliver something quickly
   Nobody is realistically going to wait for you to see out your initial 3 months without some business improvement. This shouldn't be too difficult for any CDO new to the role, as there are always quick wins to be had
10. Have fun

Have I missed anything?

Is your Digital Strategy actually Strategic?

Does your Digital Strategy really deliver a vision and road map that takes your organisation forward?
Or does it simply to just wallpaper over the cracks and problems?

This is a question I've been wresting with lately and one that's let me to reconsider the work I do and scope of what Ideal Interface is actually involved in.

Or to put it another way, let me share with you a few key parts of a digital strategy outline and one that companies could use as the basic of their own.

Strive to be 'digital first':
Whether this be in the way you communicate to prospects, the way you design your core services or the way you integrate with business partners, 'digital first' is both a philosophy and a key requirement.

Accept change as a constant:
Understand that there is a continual change in customer & user preferences, channel shift patterns and technology trends. 

Be inclusive and user-centred:
Providing self-service functionality via digital touch-points isn't enough. You need to do this regardless of a user's: ability, connection, device and location.

Be optimised:
Whether this be by providing relevant, timely & targeted information or by maximising revenue using sophisticated conversion optimisation techniques, nothing stands still and everything needs to be tested, modified, measured and tested again (and quickly).

Be great:
I'll leave this one up to you.....

Building your corporate digital analytics capability

As an organisation develops its digital understanding, you see certain trends and processes emerging. One of those is the increasing usage of digital analytics and increasing business reliance on the figures produced.

Digital analytics is now taken seriously as a business tool. From what was once a mainly geek-ish domain has emerged a significant service that can empower the business to make more rational or efficient decisions.  But just as other digital resources have grown (and grown-up) over time, the analytics resource in your organisation may well have grown too. If fact, making the point a bit stronger, if your web analytics team has not grown in size or depth in their understanding as the rest of your online capability has matured, you are probably missing something.

However… creating, scaling and keeping your web insight team is not an easy task.
Firstly positioning the team as just another marketing service is not the right approach. Having them regarded in the same light as a search engine optimisation or pay-per-click resource misses the point. This is not to take anything away from the SEO or PPC staff you might employ but the online analytics function is not just there to inform and maintain the current activity… but can also be used to feed insight back into your organisation too.

Creating the right online customer analysis and insight team structure depends a lot on the size & scale of your company. Most small companies do not have someone dedicated to this role (unless they are a digitally-focused business such as an eCommerce site) and even a lot of bigger companies combine the work of a web analytics function with other disciplines, and in a lot of cases this is digital marketing. It is therefore typically only much larger enterprises that can usually afford or utilise a dedicated person or persons in a digital analysis capacity.

Structuring this multi-person team can then be a little different from the way you might structure another digital functions. Although a lot depends on the types and quality of the individuals you hire. Just having a bunch of people who can all do the same things might not provide enough specialisation or focus… and analytics can quickly get into specifics. Some larger teams can range in skill-sets from more technical-orientated people through to business-based modellers who can pull trends and opportunities from complex data structures.

Keeping the team (aside from the effects of your own management style) can be the hardest thing to achieve. From my own experience there is currently a lack of decent experience digital analytics professionals out in the market right now. Quite frankly, we need more digital analytics experts. People with the right skills and experience are given far more choice about who and where they work, with many choosing a more lucrative career as a freelancer or consultant. Therefore holding on to good digital insight staff is crucial if your organisation is to you want to grow your capability and retain best practice knowledge.