There has been something that I have been musing over lately. To be honest to the point of irritation, even annoyance.
Why is it so difficult for clients to execute digital in their businesses? I know I’m generalising here, so please bear with me. Why are many of the businesses we work with and for so out of step from a digital perspective? The gap between their skills and the required skills is increasing exponentially. The only conclusion I can get to is; there is a lack of digital leadership from the top.
The current digital landscape looks like this:
You have digital “directors”, but their position sits below board level. You don’t have anyone solely responsible for driving digital customer experience. This baffles me, as from a customer experience point of view, the majority of consumer touch points are now digital. Until businesses recognise that there needs to be digital leadership, they will continue to struggle.
To execute digital effectively, you need a well thought out strategy that needs to span across the entire business. Then you need vision and political power to drive this forward. This is the most difficult part and biggest challenge to overcome. I personally feel it’s very difficult to 1) find that kind of person in most businesses today, and I’m talking agencies to brands and everything in-between and 2) have the leadership support at board level to make the difference.
The other side to this is there seems to be no imperative to get this right. This absolutely needs to change in the next few years. Our kids’ generation or the bottom-end of our generation expects so much more. Because of the nature of the working generations, we can still make excuses for not getting things done properly, this will not be acceptable within the next few years.
Change will only happen with the right digital leadership. The Problem is that businesses don’t have the talent pool to pull from. Next year I celebrate my 20th year of “being” digital and if truth must be told, I don’t see many others around with that amount of experience. I don’t want to be egotistical, but many of the people that work for me were wearing nappies or weren’t even born when I started my digital career!
Based on what I can seen and have learnt, I understand what needs to be done to align the business landscape to the realities of life in the 21st Century. But, I need other digital champions who have the experience, knowledge and political clout and sit at the right organisational level. There…rant done!
Davenport Face 