How to Hire a Great Chief Digital Officer?

The pervasiveness of mobile, devices, cloud, analytics and connectivity has created a perfect storm for new business models and better customer experience. Companies from Amazon to Uber have shown us the impact that the right cocktail of technologies could have on customer experience, growth and profits. As software eats the world, companies are experiencing rapid changes in their business ecosystems. Companies with traditional business models are compelled to cross the digital chasm. In fact, digital is proving to be THE strategy in most industries. 
 
With that in mind, forward thinking companies have been launching initiatives to leverage the power of emerging technologies, often headed by the Chief Digital Officer (CDO). Based on my interactions with customers and Digital Transformation experts, I present the key factors to consider when hiring a CDO for your company.

Technology Expertise
Today’s digital leaders should have good grasp of devices, networking, security, cloud, devops, workflow automation, machine learning, analytics, mobile, legacy integration, security, and industry standards. The CDO should have a deep understanding of how to integrate these technologies in new and varied ways to increase value in the company’s products and services. In addition, for some of the industry verticals with strong regulatory needs (such as medical devices), domain expertise may be indispensable as well.

Entrepreneurship 
What makes the CDO role unique and challenging is that in addition to the diverse technical skills, they need to have good entrepreneurial chops. Entrepreneurial Alertness to business opportunities is a skill that is often hard to learn on the fly. It is usually honed over the years. As such I highly recommend hiring a person with prior full cycle entrepreneurship experience. Prior entrepreneurial stint indicates the person’s ability to think critically, identify new opportunities, navigate market forces and build products to address those opportunities. A person with such traits and experience with Agile Methodology usually has an understanding of how to build the right iterations, fail fast and keep forging forward.

UX Skills
The CDO should have strong grasp of the psychology of end-to-end user experience. In many companies UX is normally limited to UI design. However UX spans the entire ecosystem and all the touch points with the user?—?not just the UI. For example, for Amazon, the UX of the customer includes the web/app usability, low prices, services like prime, quick delivery, easy returns, customer reviews, among other things that you already know of!

Transformation Leadership
Change is never easy. Digital transformations often entail substantial changes to the status quo (mindset, organizational habits, and processes). Therefore, the CDO should have excellent people and collaborative skills. People that have led (or been part of) prior non-trivial transformations develop the ability to blend technology and social/people skills and drive positive impact. The importance of soft skills in such endeavors cannot be undermined.

Conclusion

Hiring for CDO could be one of the most critical hires at this juncture in most companies. It is surely a tough role to live, and is not for the faint heart! However, the right individual, with the right org set up (environmental factors) could bring exceptional results. Therefore, it is worthwhile to make the time and effort to look for the right individual with the right blend of the above skills.

P.S: In some companies this role is called Chief Innovation Officer. The terminology and titles are still fluid in the industry.

This post originally appeared on my blog at https://medium.com/@akadiyala/how-to-hire-a-great-chief-digital-officer-cd8565a28d15#.fyspxv8fj