Are you really a digital strategist?

It's quite funny to me to see the term 'Digital Strategy' appear in job descriptions for roles across the online world, including those I now help clients fill.

Note: it's even funnier to see what some candidates actually think constitutes the creation and delivery of a Digital Strategy and in-turn make them a Digital Strategist.

I therefore thought it would be useful to highlight those activities and approaches that I believe a digital strategist might use in their role.
(Of course, it would be easy to start listing out all the things they are not, but then that list might turn out to be quite long.)

So here's my list:

• Think strategic
  Always keep the vision of what digital technologies, processes and marketing can do for your organisation and how this change applies to the company aims and objectives. This means that you have to understand the end game, but also how you are going to close the gap between that and whatever you have now.
• Align the digital strategy to the business strategy
  No strategy exists in a vacuum and yours can add the most value when it aligned with the other competing needs of the business.
• Champion the digital strategy
  The best person in your organisation to be the digital champion is you (and your team, if you have one). Your managerial peers will need a central senior person they can consult with who 'gets this digital stuff' and can help them. This doesn't mean you suddenly need to exhibit youthful enthusiasm or a stoic 'all knowing' air - you just have to be approachable and communicative to all level. It also means you are the senior stakeholder who works with the different business units to help them contribute to the digital strategy.
• Own the digital roadmap
  Having the vision and strategy is one thing, having a plan of how this will be achieved (including the key milestones, dependencies and other influencing initiatives across your organisation) is something else. The creation and management of this plan is a key artefact in the communication of how your end game is going to be delivered.
• Grow internal digital capabilities
  You are not going to achieve your goals by yourself and you therefore need to build the required expertise within your company to take digital forward. Growing individuals and digital teams doesn't necessarily come naturally to everyone, but you can also help across different functions by outlining what skills and experience are needed in both the short and longer term

Digital leadership - be more than an online expert

Being a digital leader means you need to be more than just an absolute expert in one area of online technology or marketing. You may know all about PPC, display & remarketing, SEO, email , display, affiliates and social media, but this isn't enough. To truly be at (and stay at) the forefront of digital, you really need to have the following qualities or experience:

1.  A leader of people
It's not just enough to have line managed the odd eCommerce staff member or digital agency, you need to be a mentor & coach, a motivator and a decision maker who can support and build a high performing team members to do great things.

2. An all-rounder
To understand how to get the best from that team, you ideally need an understanding of all aspects of online business. From being able to produce a focused digital business case to justify further investment, through to engaging with your opposite number in the technology department... you are going to have to have a broad spread of expertise.

3. An innovator
What have you done in your career that wasn't just "me too" but truly ground breaking? Have you been creative in your delivery of a new digital platform or applied a new method or approach to a building a difficult user interface? Have you been the first in your industry to trial a new device or an advanced technology that was subsequently adopted by the rest?

4. A strategic brain
Are you able to consider the bigger picture and link your team's work to the business drivers of the wider company? The creation and ownership of your organisations digital strategy should sit with you, it's yours to manage shape and develop as the company grows in its adoption of new online technologies and practices.

5. A customer advocate
Do you know who your customers are and what their digital needs really are? Do you know why your online presence or your eCRM initiatives work well (and why sometimes they don't strike a core)? It's not just a case of hiring a user experience (UX) person to do your thinking for you... you also need to get under the skin of your users and know what drives both their loyalty & resistance.

6. A scientist
Getting data from your analytics package is a basic necessity for any online practitioner these days, but being able to dive into the dashboards and analyse the insight that the information is giving you needs more than just a little diligence. You should also have experience of carrying out multiple experiments to improve your goals, ideally from a programme of on-going AB and Multi-Variate tests.

7. A communicator
It's fine to have strong views on those topics that you are passionate about, but you also need to be able to get your ideas across in a structured and eloquent manner.... especially to senior stakeholders.

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?

Finding User Experience Resource in Glasgow

Since moving to Glasgow I have noticed that there’s been a lack of some digital-specific skills. The most obvious so far has been around the subject of analytics & insight. However more recently there has been a new glaring resource gap opened up… User Experience.

I currently have a large client project in the Glasgow area that requires User Experience resource.  So for the last couple of weeks I've been looking for decent local freelancers who can consultant on-site over 2 to 3 months. This is an important piece of work and I really need someone who can take things from Customer Strategy all the way through to wire-framing (ideally with large eCommerce and travel experience).

However, despite one unsuccessful avenue, I've so far drawn a blank. And after speaking with several digital contacts in Glasgow, there seems to be a real unmet demand for decent and available user experience contractors and consultants in the West Coast of Scotland.

Or am I missing something?

Why the role of CDO is needed

In a posting on eConsultancy this week, Ashley Friedlein provided his thoughts on Why a Chief Digital Officer is a bad idea. This article basically stated that a CDO wasn't needed in the modern board room.

Having written on this blog about the role the Chief Digital Officer should have, I thought I would disagree with Ashley's opinions. However, despite the (obvious linkbait) headline, I found myself partly in agreement with the post.

You see, we are living in a time of tremendous technical change, where digital technology has moved on significantly in just one employee generation. This means that there are still very few career digital people on the boards of major organisations... but this is gradually changing and one day all members of the C-suite will be 'digital natives' and have grown up with online.

Until then, the role of CDO is needed, but as a transformation role.

One alternative approach that might work for some major organisations... is to take on a Digital Non-Exec Director. This would be someone who has the full compliment of online skills, to see the company leaders through this evolutionary period. This would have the benefit of integrating a CDO-type person into the organisation, without the need to restructure the board.

Does Scotland have a digital skills issue?

I see a huge digital/eCommerce/online opportunity available to Scotland. There's people doing great things here and I'm impressed with a lot of what I see.

But Scotland can only truly take advantage of the new digital economy if:

1. There is a decent supply of brains
Academia has its part to play here, by educating and training the best to not only gain qualifications. but to be employable. However the digital industry also has another part to play here, rather than just rely on the cream of the crop from the top universities…..by recognising where it can cross-train slightly more experienced people from alternative disciplines. I did this in the late 1990’s when all the online start-ups had exhausted the supply of programmers, digital project managers, etc. It worked then, it can work now.

2. There are roles available
A actually think that entrepreneurs are doing a lot in Scotland to move things forward and from what I’ve seen so far they are given a fair amount encouragement and resources. But they can only generate a certain amount of new roles. IMHO more traditional businesses must also step up to the plate and realise that the world is moving fast, very fast…… and that older models of working, selling and distribution are not necessarily the ways of the future.
The figure I quoted in an earlier blog posting from the Scottish Enterprise report into eCommerce showed how little IT jobs contained the word ‘eCommerce’ in them.
Surely this isn’t the fault of the labour supply, who (with the right education, exposure and training) can be highly useful digital resources?….. To me is shows a lack of general demand for digital roles up here.

Which if it is true, is more worrying!

Low quality video production... why?

So....

• Every video podcasting site will tell you its not expensive to produce video content for your website.
• Every salesman will tell you that their £500 digital video camera produces professional quality footage as standard.
• Every non-linear video editing (NLVE) software suite's specifications will inform you of the high definition, mulit-codec, images it can create.

But when you try it out, all you get is various clips that look like they were done on the cheap. Why?

Here's a clue...

Sometimes its not about the quality of the kit you buy, its about the skill of the person shooting and editing the video.