Hobbyists still run the digital world – where are the experts?

Nobody is new to digital any more. It is merely the water in which we swim – a normal, everyday part of our lives. Yet the business news we see daily is littered with stories of rampant success and shocking failure.

Brand Learning recently carried out research among senior management, analysing the digital maturity of global companies, which might reveal some of the underlying reasons. At first it looks like good news. Six out of 10 directors say their business has seen an emergence of a culture that integrates new digital behaviours with its existing company heritage. These companies demonstrate an increasingly mature attitude to risk, recognising the need to change ahead of market disruption.

However, here’s the rub: more than a third (35%) also say their digital change still relies on hobbyists and passionate individuals, and that they have no specialist digital people (so-called digital natives). In fact, only 4% would call their employees genuine digital natives: agile and entrepreneurial people who are both passionate about customer value and embracers of technology.

Brand Learning spoke to 42 human resource directors at some of the world’s biggest household brands and the findings suggest that digital still seems to be handled in silos and minority pockets. It shows the thin ice on which some digital strategies are being built, even among companies that seem at first glance to have it all in hand.

At the same time as this uncertainty has arisen, digital disruption has driven the emergence of a new set of skills that require embedding across commercial teams. These range from the scientific: collating and analysing behaviour patterns from multiple sources, to story building: shaping content to engage customers across the journey. These and other new skills are the bedrock of digital maturity and need to be integrated into both fresh and traditional roles.

However, few organisations are in this place. More typically, individuals engaged in digital work are scattered around the organisation and obtain their roles based on passion or a recruitment process that is focused on a knee-jerk solution to a recently identified gap.

Even in more mature organisations, digital expertise is rarely integrated, and instead treated as a discrete specialism with roles bolted on to the edge of the organisational structure or dropped into a black box “centre of excellence”. The social media experts of a brand might know their stuff, but that’s often just three people out of a global marketing team in the hundreds.

The centre of excellence scenario can be successful and many companies have tried it. However, this discrete isolation of the digital specialism runs the risk of a digital agenda that is pursued in isolation rather than as an enabler of the broader business strategy. It also relies heavily on a group of skilled individuals, leaving the business vulnerable when they leave.

And leave they probably will. There’s a huge war for talent with digital natives: they’re able and willing to move around, expensive and fussy about what they’re brought in to accomplish. To attract them, companies need to articulate exciting, competitive opportunities, pay the right money and offer the right working environment.

But people are only one of the pillars of capability on which digital maturity is built. Businesses looking to develop long-term capabilities that embed digital across the organisation need to tackle the building of such capabilities more broadly. Digital capability building must go beyond upskilling and be rooted in corporate objectives, organisational structure, processes and culture, as well as in skills.

It quickly becomes obvious that sustained digital success – and maturity – is directly attributable to the broader foundations that the c-suite puts in place. Leadership should be focusing on this rather than on what its new mobile app looks like.

It’s cliched to say, but it is the leadership function’s role to drive the overarching long-term capability of the organisation. If the c-suite starts to view digital maturity through this lens, it will become easier to identify where it needs to step up.

Paul Randle is digital capability director at Brand Learning

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