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Building the Right Team for Your Digital Transformation Initiatives
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Building the Right Team for Your Digital Transformation Initiatives

At Qentelli, we work with different clients for their Digital Transformation (DT) initiatives for creating digital and futuristic businesses. Qentelli acts as a strategic and technology partner for solving complex challenges in the journey and achieving the digital objectives. To do so, we work with clients to establish a Digital Transformation team.

In this blog post, we will answer questions on the top of any CIO’s mind while building a Digital Transformation Team. Where to start when building a digital transformation team? What capabilities it requires? Where to find the right talent? Where to find the right talent within the company? Is it required to hire people from other organizations? Is it helpful to engage with specialized Digital Transformation company?

Digital Transformation initiatives require People, Process and Technology to work collaboratively. Over the period various studies and researches, cite ‘People’ as the most critical element for driving and succeeding in the Digital Transformation initiative.

Before outlining the designations, capabilities and skills required for a successful digitalization team, there are few aspects to keep in mind while building teams for DT Initiative.

  • People Track–Appoint a digital visionary leader to drive the approach. Enabling cross-functionality and bringing in collaboration to achieve the vision.
  • Process Track–Identify most impactful processes and introduce changes to upgrade the company’s “hard wiring.” The end-result should be more efficient processes.
  • Technology Track–Replacing the older technology with the new technology to make business agile, scalable and efficient.
  • Information Track–Streamlining the data generated and turning it into an information; and governing the information going out to serve the existing customers better and attract the new customers faster.

People

Part of any successful transformation is having the appropriate team to champion the idea from top to bottom and across organization.

Why?

People build teams, who in turn, drive culture, establish right vision and possess future skills to drive the Digital Agenda.

51% of the highest performing enterprises see their cultures as holding them back in the digital transformation journey. Laggards, on the other hand, are missing the warning signs – only 36% of the lowest performing enterprises identify culture as a problem to progress. – HFS Research

In a BCG study of 40 digital transformations, companies that focused on culture were 5x more likely to achieve breakthrough performance than companies that neglected culture.

 

We put together how Digital Transformation team should look like and how to set up the team with right capabilities that can scale and sustain the digital changes.

Digital Transformation Team – How does it look like?

We talked about how a Digital Experience team looks like in one of our previous articles titled – 10 things you must do for better Digital Customer Experience (CX)–Part 1The same framework can be used for developing high-performing Digital Transformation team.

We will have a detailed look at the digitalization team discuss more about the composition, roles, and skills required for creating an outcome-driven Digital Transformation team.

  1. Executive Leadership – Digital transformation initiatives require complete buy-in from management. Executives have the big-picture perspective of the business and industry to make the transformation successful. If we want to name the chief of DT initiatives, there are a lot of options like Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Officer etc. While Chief of Digital Transformation is accountable for operational activities, business transformation is a strategic initiative requiring complete collaboration of entire C-suite. The otherwise approach will lead to superficial changes, tough to percolate deep down the business, bringing the required cultural change. We recommend organizations to identify people from the existing C-suite to drive this change, as they understand the business better than anyone other. If that’s not possible, we recommend hiring someone from the similar industry and experience of driving business changes at a broader level.
  2. Skills required–The head of Digital Transformation team should have a thorough understanding of business and customers. Customers are the focus of the whole DT initiative. The second important skill is the understanding of new-age technologies such as Cloud, AI, ML, Data Science and how leverage right talent to build a modern and futuristic business model. The third and most important skill is people management–this skill is required to convince the board members, manage people and culture change and bring the organization wide alignment of the Digital Transformation ideas.
  3. Core Digital Transformation Team – The core digital experience team are the hands-on practitioners of different technologies and business verticals. Few designations that comes under core digitalization team are Product Managers, Program Managers, Solution Architects and Senior Managers of Business and Technical teams. To develop core Digital Experience Team, organizations need to hire and re-skill existing employees.

    Well balanced Digital Transformation Team

    Organizations must familiarize employees with new initiatives and give a chance to employees looking to change the course of their career. This will require extensive training programs and training sessions based on the new skills required by organization.

    Skills required – These skills will vary based on what tools and technologies are enabling business transformation. For example, a company on the path of cloud migration require cloud experts with knowledge of new technologies such as Microservices, Containers, Serverless architecture. Further the team will involve Cloud architects, Cloud Engineers, Data Center Operations, Analysts, Administrators, Help Desk etc. Another example includes setting up of an AI team that can include Machine-Learning engineers, Data Scientists, Applied Scientists, Data Engineers and other roles. These roles require people good at adapting to change, team players, agile practitioners, management and excellent communication skills.

  4. Extended Digital Transformation Team – The extended digital team can involve developers, designers, visualizers, junior data scientists, AI and ML engineers, business analysts etc.

    Skills Required – The extended digital transformation team requires specialized skills in the areas of development, designing, data science, coding, infrastructure to provide finesses in the Digital Transformation program. Based on the size of organizations, the extended digitalization team can be very large. This requires additional hiring of talent and re-skilling existing talent in more than one tool and technologies. At Qentelli, we recently trained our entire test automation team on the new tool knows as Tosca for a large-scale test automation project.

balanced digital transformation team

Digital Transformation-It’s a Team Game

The success of Digital Transformation is entirely dependent on culture, and your Digital Transformation team plays an important role in driving this culture management program. At Qentelli, we advise our clients to build a digital team for the long haul that can bring and sustain the Digital Transformation changes. A high-performing Digital Transformation team will be a mix of team members with the thorough knowledge of your business and new team members who bring in a new perspective to explore ideal technologies.

Qentelli has helped many organizations understand the change their current business model needs to survive and thrive in the age of Digital Transformation. If you are on your path to Digital Transformation and looking for right partner to help you navigate this path, we are here to help. Reach us at info@qentelli.com