Business leaders must refocus their workforces for the Digital Era

However, many companies focused their transformation efforts on IT and business processes, and tended to neglect their employees, which are the “greatest asset” of the company. By overlooking this asset, companies are failing to build the capabilities they will need to succeed in an era of digital disruption.

Cisco projects that by 2020, 50 billion objects will be connected to the Internet, generating massive streams of big data. As such, organisations must ensure that people are empowered by new forms of communication so they will be able to capture massive opportunity in a new digital value.

According to a new report from the Centre for Digital Business Transformation (DBT Centre), an IMD and Cisco initiative, fewer than 10 per cent of companies have achieved a level of excellence in three key capabilities of digital business agility – hyperawareness – ability to sense what is going on throughout the enterprise, among its competitors, and in the marketplace; informed decision-making - using data and analytics to empower the workforce, resulting in better decisions at every level of the organisation; and fast execution - responding rapidly once a decision is made.

These are three foundational capabilities that organisations must build in their workforces in order to successfully compete in the digital disruption era.

In this digital vortex today, most industries are feeling the disruption.  A healthcare organisation is trying to scale its doctors to consult patients across various facilities in different time zones. A bank is trying to increase customer intimacy and wants to deliver personalised mortgage and lending services across a network of distributed branches with centralised specialist. A retailer wants to extend the shopping experience to the mobile devices of shoppers before they enter the store and while they’re perusing shelves. A teacher is finding the way to push a curriculum to the mobile devices of her students to meet the specific learning needs of her individual students. A manufacturer wants its engineers to have high quality interactions with many distributed factory floors to make the fast and effective business decisions.

A government is looking to enable its multi-generational workforce to work anywhere, anytime. Collaboration becomes a central for work while the way we collaborate at work has evolved. The speed that accommodates those new experiences will be a key to differentiate them from competitors. Over the past five years, companies with digital business agility in their workforces were three times more likely to characterise their financial performance as “better than average”.

It is time to nurture skills of a digital workforce to keep pace with digital disruption. Creating digital specialists while empowering non-IT people and a high digital skilled workforce will help the country generate high-value jobs and have ‘digital workplace ecology’ as a core driver to enhance economy and social development for the country.

 

Vatsun Thirapatarapong is managing director for Cisco in Thailand and Indochina.