The danger of not being on top of digital is clear. It’s not just that your organisation will lose a bit of business if it doesn’t employ next-gen tools, it’s that your business will ultimately fail.
There is a huge amount of promise around what big data, analytics, AI and other digital developments will help businesses achieve, but you won’t be able to capitalise on this unless you know what it all means and how it applies to your organisation.
You and every member of your organisation need to have that awareness. From office administrator to CFO, each person must understand how to use data in their role to make a difference.
Andrew Grill highlights digital curiosity as a necessity. He says,
“It’s a massive problem if you don’t know what is happening digitally in your industry or to your own company: you’re not just sleep-walking, you’re walking completely blind into a minefield. You need to disrupt before you’re disrupted.”
The truth is, there is nothing mysterious about digital.
You don’t need to be a computing graduate to be a data scientist, you just need access to relevant technologies ‒ which are increasingly available to everyone thanks to open-source software ‒ and, crucially, the aptitude, motivation and time to learn.
The shift businesses need to make is the realignment of learning as a priority led not by HR, or even the C-suite, but by every member of staff. Your business success relies on having a diverse workforce with the desire to learn and adapt.
The beauty of our fast-changing world is that anyone can learn anything ‒ knowledge and skills once the preserve of the few are being democratised.
Most organisations don’t have an unlimited budget for technology or training.
While businesses such as Google are buying up entire university departments in an effort to fuel their need for digital talent, the rest must rely on smart strategies rather than raw buying power.
Education, upskilling and re-skilling are the answer. Harnessing the potential of big data analytics or machine learning within your organisation, for example, requires use of what have always been regarded as specialist data analysis and data mining tools.
But there are open-source as well as proprietary versions of these tools available to anyone with the willingness to learn.
Kathryn Parsons has a real-life example of this in action. She says,
“In one month a Decoded Data Academy student, who had never written a line of code in their life, learnt how to use new tools to do clustering analysis on the sales data sets in their business, allowing them to predict customer purchasing decisions."
However, the majority of companies aren’t embracing the transformation potential of learning – or giving their employees the time and freedom they need.
Business leaders must spearhead enlightened approaches to learning. For example, giving staff time during their working days to acquire new role-based skills.
Or enabling time off work to learn skills that aren’t directly related to their role, but that will be advantageous for their career and personal progression.
This approach is still regarded as progressive in most industries and among most companies, with few embracing training to this extent.
However, these types of initiative should be regarded as an investment in the future of your business rather than as lost productivity or an expense that cannot be recouped.