Digital Leadership
Effective Leadership includes the ability to set direction and strategy. In the Digital and IT space, there are many things that we have to set direction on – digital transformation, whether we move everything to the cloud, which technologies to invest in, how to support our organizations achieving their overall business outcomes and objectives
Critical Dependency
Our world has become increasing dependent on digital technology. It’s difficult to find an organization or industry that doesn’t have a critical dependency on technology.
Despite being in the technology business, we need to realise that really we are in the people business. We are dependent on people with various skills, competencies and experience for everything we do, no matter how clever we are with the technology. We still need people to analyse requirements, architect solutions, design component, manage projects, build, implement and support the technology.
With the growing dependency on technology in almost all industries, it’s no surprise that people with the required skills and competencies are in high demand, and many organizations are experiencing skills shortages.
Direction
Digital Leadership certainly requires us to understand the technology and to set the direction – but we also need to understand our people, skills and competencies, and this is often an area where IT people are less comfortable.
As individual professionals, our career is a journey, with multiple legs or stages on that journey. As professionals, we can’t afford to leave it to change – we need to take some ownerships of our own skills and competencies, and our development planning.
As leaders, we need to help set the direction for our people, supporting them in their development in order to progress them as individuals and also to ensure our organizations can achieve desired objectives.
To work out which direction to head in next, just like with any satellite navigation system, we need some key elements:
- Knowing where we are now (turn on the SatNav, let it connect to the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites and show your current location on the map)
- Identifying where we need to go next (input the name or address, or finding it on a map)
- the GPS system gives us a common framework for expressing any location, including current location and next destination
- My phone contains the map, and has access to the data so I can find places and road names etc.
- Armed with this information, we can plot a route or a number of alternative routes, and make adjustments based on traffic conditions and diversions, or our travel preferences.
Common language and definitions
Most of us don’t really want to create a new language, new words, and definitions – we will just pick the language we want to speak, and learn the vocabulary and rules of speaking that language. Some companies attempt to create their own skills and competencies taxonomies or frameworks, but like a made-up language it won’t make sense to the majority of people, not unless you teach them the language. Are we really in the business of creating a brand new alternative to the GPS system and the existing maps and place naming conventions?
SFIA is globally recognised and adopted, available in several translations, and is maintained for you by a global community coordinated by the not-for-profit SFIA Foundation. SFIA, the Skills Framework for the Information Age, describes skills and competencies required by professionals in roles involving information and communications technology. SFIA has become the globally accepted common language for the skills and competencies required in the digital world, used by organisations and individuals in nearly 200 countries. SFIA provides the equivalent of the GPS system plus the maps and location naming conventions – but none of these tell you where to go and how to get there unless you identify your current location and your next target destination. You identify these things using SFIA.
Where are we now?
Do we know for certain whether we have the right skills and competencies to achieve all of our priority challenges? The answer for most organizations is “WE DON’T KNOW”, because they don’t even have a skills inventory of the current skills – i.e. they don’t know their current location. Luckily solving this is relatively easy, just like turning on your SatNav and allowing it to pinpoint your current location using GPS and show it to you on a map. Each person can quickly and easily identify their skills using SFIA within the SkillsTX SaaS solution – depending on the working experience of the individual, this typically takes between 10 minutes and 60 minutes, and only needs to be done once. Once each person has a skills profile, they just keep it up-to-date by adding in new skills and levels of skills as they gain more experience and complete development activities – just like keeping your GPS turned on so you always know your current location. This data can then be rolled-up and viewed at multiple levels – for the individual, the team, the department, the IT function, the whole organization, or even at country level.
Some organizations think they know what skills they have – their current location. However, my experience is that when they turn on the GPS and assess the skills they really have, the are different to what they thought. If you are planning a journey, all routes are going to be wrong if you are plotting it from the wrong current location – this is why many companies fail to get the full value of their training and development budget, because they focus on the wrong skills – including sending people on training at the wrong level of skill or for skills they already have.
Not knowing also has a personal impact, leading to people leaving due to a perceived lack of opportunity to maintain current skills and develop new ones. The stress of not knowing what they have to do to be successful in their current role, or not being able to express their challenges and needs, are taken away by using the common language of SFIA and using this to assess current skills and identify target actions.
Where do we want / need to go next?
For some people the answer will be to become fully productive in their current role or job – so their immediate focus will be on comparing the current skills with a SFIA-based version of their current role profile or job description. They can use the universal language of SFIA to identify their development needs, knowing exactly which skills and at which level, and then decide on the most appropriate actions for their development action plan. This may be done in collaboration with their manager, to agree best actions and get approval for funding and time required. The mapped content available from many training providers and certification bodies, where they have already mapped their offerings to SFIA, help quickly identify the pre-defined actions which match the target skills/levels.
For those who have completed all the development needed for their current role, and are fully performing to the required standard, their focus may be on the next step in their career path. With a full skills profile, including all the skills they have and not just the subset they use in their current role, they can identify roles or jobs which they already have a partial skills match to. They can also explore other roles or views of SFIA which show them the most relevant skills for particular disciplines – for example “the skills needed by someone wishing to specialise in cybersecurity”.
Managers may be looking at the collective skills across their teams, ensuring they have the balance they need and making tactical decisions about which skills each person will focus on. They may need to identify someone with a skill they need for a particular task, sprint or project – which is easy when you have an up-to-date view of current skills.
As long as you have gathered the current skills inventory data in an appropriate way (we discussed this in a previous blog Thing have got to change), when you find a new requirement, whether that is a project, agile sprint, task, or a brand new product/service/system/technology, you can check your skills inventory to see if you already have the skills and competencies required and plan actions appropriately.
Senior executives, including the CIO or CTO, can look at the data across the department to identify strengths and challenges, including where their most critical people and skills related risks are. It is much better to know exactly where these are as soon as possible, so you can take action and mitigate the risk rather than finding out about the gap the hard way when a project fails, a system breaks down, or there is a security breach. Analysis shows that many of these issues making the press are due to not having the right people with the right skills in the right roles – they are often skills and competencies related rather than a pure technology failure.
Of course, “what-if” analysis can also be used to answer many questions such as “do we have the skills to:”
- Deliver the next stage of our digital transformation?
- Prevent data loss and Cybersecurity incidents?
- Operate our desired Operating Model?
- Deliver service to agreed levels?
- Integrate during mergers and acquisitions?
- Recruit, retain and develop talented individuals?
- Ensure compliance with legislation and quality standards?
- Improve project success and support agile operation?
- Gain competitive advantage in responding to technology change and innovation?
How to get started
Take 10-minutes to confirm where your organization is right now in terms of Digital Skills Management, and get some free advice and guidance on the next leg of your journey
