Greetings everybody!
By popular demand, I will switch gears today to an important topic.
Today we will discuss which hard and soft skills are required throughout this big business transformation to be ready for the new business opportunities ahead.
Why do professionals need new skills? What is this re-skilling about?
Let me step back to explain the situation.
In the past, businesses used to plan and estimate (educated guess) market demands.
Extreme Business Transformation allows organizations to collaborate in real-time with customers and partners and understand rapidly changing customer demands and expectations. As a result, they can also adapt to these new demands in real time.
This is a game-changer for the information worker. Typically the information worker works based on processes or projects. Still, the new status quo is closer to a learning organization and a high-performance team and less like a productive process-oriented business.
Hmm, Jose, but we want to work based on processes and projects; working in a continuous learning organization may become costly and non-profitable. Is this a transient situation or a new status quo?
Excellent question; my guess is this is a temporary stage. Let me explain why.
How are organizations affected by the new business model imposed by Digital Transformation?
As we move into our Digital Transformation journey, we are experiencing a new reality: The importance of an augmented reality supported by real-time data.
The new reality requires new processes to be adopted so that the business can reach a new level of stability despite the dynamic changes imposed by this augmented reality.
– Adaptable and stable while changing at high speed?
– You got it!
So, this new reality imposes a new set of rules for information workers:
- Continuous improvements and continuous delivery, instead of a Big Bang approach.
- Any business response must be reviewed and approved at high speed. The answer may be incomplete but correct (work in progress) rather than incomplete because of a perfectionist approach.
- Typically, learning organization approaches embrace a trial culture. Amazon is an excellent example of that – they love to do a quick trial with a small segment of customers and learn the market dynamics before going live. Coca-Cola is also an excellent example of that – did you know that Houston (a multi-cultural megacity) is a preferred destination for Coca-Cola to do market trials before going live? I’ve seen a couple of Coca-Cola products in Houston that I haven’t found in other places when I travel. I’ve noticed that sometimes, they never go live. For example, a product called C2, a soda made with sugar and sweeteners but only 50% of the calories, was discontinued in 2006.
Trials? Does that sound like testing, testing, testing?
Yes, you got it.
The new reality will require learning organizations to invest energy to monitor the outcomes of all these multi-step approaches effectively, organically, and daily.
I got you, Jose, so where do you see growth opportunities?
Re-skilling opportunities for Information Workers
Here’s a list of a few growth opportunities for information workers:
Anything related to high-performance teams and continuous improvement
- Project Management
- Agile Methodologies
- Six-Sigma Lean Organizations
Anything related to Analytics
- Data Capture
- Data Cleaning
- ETL
- Data Tagging/Metadata
- Data Processing, building Analytics Modules
- Protecting Data Integrity
Anything related to managing Trials
- Marketing
- Dev/Ops, User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
- Mobile Apps, User Experience Monitoring.
- Sales incentives
Anything related to Systems Integration
- People Integration
- Process Integration
- Technology Integration
Cyber-security will continue to be a critical skill in the future.
- Data Security
- Asset Security
- Access Security
- Application Security
A note of encouragement
My personal feeling is that as we move along this journey, a new set of processes will emerge, allowing us to have a more stable way of behaving based on learning organizations that have updated procedures in place. These procedures will enable organizations to attend to customer demands in real-time, which will result in a “raising the bar” effect.
If this is a topic of interest, please let me know. I am glad to expand on this topic in future episodes.
Good enough?
If you are interested in the re-skilling areas of improvement, please let me know. We can address each area deeper in future episodes.
This is a fascinating topic, how technology and innovation affect human behavior and how we can use these changes to improve life quality.
But this is not my call, but your call. Please let me know your thoughts.
As I said before, my goal in writing these episodes is to share a thought on areas of improvement and risks ahead among business leaders.
My goal is to enable this forum as a thought leader soundboard.
Would you mind helping me with the following?
– What questions do you have for me? Feel free to add your questions and comments.
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Cheers,