What are the key digital skills and competencies for your team and how to develop them?

data literacy, digital communication, cybersecurity awareness, and proficiency in specific tools or platforms relevant to the team's function. Developing these skills requires a structured training program that combines formal education, hands-on practice, and continuous learning opportunities, such as workshops, webinars, and mentorship programs.

Initiate by defining "Digital" prerequisites. E.g- Determine if full SQL proficiency is needed across the team or if select individuals will suffice. Envision organizational trajectory for 15 years, identifying key digital skills for 5 years. Compile a list and start training from basic to advanced levels. Currently, focus on data literacy, visualization, and digital communication, but prepare for AI dominance. Assign tasks for progress monitoring to ensure effective development.

Assessing your organization's digital maturity is the initial step in integrating digital technologies into strategic planning. Utilize models like the MIT Sloan and Deloitte framework, evaluating across strategy, customer, operations, and workforce dimensions. This assessment identifies strengths and gaps, guiding prioritization of digital initiatives and investments for strategic success.

Digital performance is the extent to which your digital initiatives deliver the expected results and outcomes. You can use a dashboard, such as the Balanced Scorecard, to track and measure your digital performance across four perspectives: financial, customer, internal, and learning and growth

Instead of assessing digital maturity, flip the focus. Look for emergent tech trends in your industry and build a cross-functional team to pilot them. Prioritize skills in data interpretation and adaptive learning. Equip your team with continuous learning platforms and encourage innovation hackathons. Measure success by tracking KPIs like time-to-innovation and market adaptability.

Move beyond defining digital vision and goals. Map customer pain points and industry gaps first. Craft your digital vision to directly address these areas. Set audacious goals, not just SMART ones. Focus on building a culture of rapid experimentation and feedback loops. Track progress with KPIs like innovation adoption rate and customer satisfaction scores.

Before defining goals, define "digital" for you. At Coca-Cola, digital breaks out into two broad buckets: digital commerce, and digital infrastructure. The commerce element dictates how we market and sell our products, covering pure play digital channels and omnichannel environments. The infrastructure bucket covers how we operate internally using digital tools; this can include anything from our intranet, data lakes, reporting tools, and myriad other digitally enabled devices or software. Define which bucket(s) are in your org and define goals relevant to each. Commerce may ones entail things like revenue or customer satisfaction, while infrastructure could include employee efficiency, team meeting quality, or employee wellbeing.

Prioritization of certain digital initiatives over others comes with the assessment of impact of executing such initiatives. For example, an initiative could be targeted to improving internal business processes to operate more efficiently or it could be targeting gaining a competitive advantage over competitors in providing an innovative customer experience/journey. Currently, the best initiatives are the ones that impact the organization's culture or "Control Environment" as that enhances the other operational based initiatives in your Strategic plan.

In some of my roles at Coca-Cola, we've employed what was considered "ruthless prioritization". Our CEO was willing to terminate 200 brands to ensure we can generate growth with what mattered most, and that mentality trickled down to our digital commerce organization. We identified a series of "big-bets" and growth drivers for digital retail and foodservice channels through exercises that looked at consumer behavior, path to purchase trends, revenue goals, and macro environment assessments. Deploying those strategies and priorities was made easier by earning leadership alignment and sponsorship.

Identifying and prioritizing digital initiatives is crucial for any team aiming to stay competitive in today's rapidly evolving digital landscape. Here are some key skills and competencies needed for this task, along with strategies for developing them: 1. Analysis: Use data to find digital opportunities. 2. Strategy: Align initiatives with goals for impact. 3. Collaboration: Work across teams for success. 4. Risk Management: Identify and handle risks. 5. Adaptability: Embrace new tech and trends. 6. Decision-making: Make informed choices. Developing these skills within your team enables effective identification and prioritization of digital initiatives, driving business growth and innovation.

My advice is to focus not just on the skills gap in an employee's current role, but more on bridging the gap towards their next role. This approach offers several benefits. Firstly, you actively engage in career development discussions. By focusing on future roles, you provide clear, concrete goals for skill development, embodying the principle of "what got you here, won't get you there." Secondly, bear in mind that skill development can be a lengthy process. There's a risk that by the time an employee masters a new skill, it may no longer be relevant if they've moved on to a different role. Focusing on future development helps avoid this pitfall.

1) A fast way to pick up digital skills/information is reading articles and watching videos on the go. Instead of searching for the info myself, I consume content from LinkedIn newsfeed which are already somewhat curated for me. 2) There is so much information about digital skills and it is not possible to learn everything. Everyone is also at different starting point in their digital skills journey. Ideally, take a small step ahead slowly instead of jumping to a higher level quickly. 3) Learn in a structured/physical class so we can be influenced by the people and environment. The mentality of "I don't want to be the slowest in this class" can sometimes push us forward to learn faster and catch up when we have pockets of available time.

One way to ensure that your team and individuals have the needed digital competencies and skills is to conduct a gap analysis at a job design level. An organization that is heavily invested on providing the latest and highly functional digital tools or platforms would have different requirements of digital competencies and skills to adapt to what I call new job design. This includes the new process and the amount of usage of digital platforms needed.

In the digital world, learning is a journey, not a destination. This means that continually identifying skills gaps should be part of your routine. 1. Identify Skills Gaps: Base this on projects you plan to work on. 2. Learning Style: Determine whether you prefer storytelling, short videos, or interactive and practical learning. Incorporating mental breaks can enhance your learning experience. 3. Take Risks and Gain Hands-On Experience: Seek accountability partners and mentors. 4. Stay Updated with Business Needs: Be aware of changes in business requirements that necessitate new skills. 5. Pay It Forward: Train and guide others.

I've found that simpler measurement is usually best. No one needs a 40-page report on digital performance, and a "What," "So What," and "Now What?" evaluation works well in many cases. Another way to frame this is by identifying observations (we surpassed our benchmark by 10%), insights (we suspect this is because featuring real people in the ads resonated with our target audience), and recommendations (we suggest A/B testing human faces in 90% of our digital advertising).

I’ll vet performance in 2 metrics: input and output. We can streamline our existing digital initiatives to achieve “less input more output” performance. Or we can add new digital initiatives to achieve “less input more output” Try to avoid any initiatives that gives “more input and output.” Worst initiatives are the “more input less output”. To vet this objectively, we can constantly ask ourselves 3 questions as we monitor and evaluate. - what worked? - what didn’t? - what might? Double down on what worked. Avoid what didn’t. Constantly experiment what might… we’ll definitely see the result that we want.