It’s no great shocker that digital skills are in short supply.

 

In our annual organizational and staffing survey of eBusiness and channel strategy professionals, we found that while eBusiness budgets have grown by more than 10%, finding the skills and capabilities to execute on a digital strategy is becoming harder and harder.

 

Technology, development, and infrastructure makes up 19% of eBusiness teams' staffing allocation. Even with 69% of those surveyed outsourcing some technology roles, almost one-third of eBusiness teams are most understaffed in technology, development, and infrastructure, up from 18% in 2013.

 

To compound the recruitment challenge, the nature of the skills you need is changing. Here’s why:

 

  • Digital transformation is a C-Level imperative, demanding that successful eBusiness teams now speak the language of business strategy and digital technology.
  • Digital skills now exist in many line-of-business teams, meaning that eBuisness teams must focus on educating, engaging and leading their line of business colleagues and less on the “doing”.
  • Your customer and competitive landscape are changing more rapidly than ever before, forcing the need for deep-rooted business agility through approaches like Design Thinking, prototyping and agile development.

eBusiness teams must develop five new killer competencies

 

To succeed in the rapidly changing, distributed and increasingly complex environment,eBusiness leaders must power up their teams’ strategy, governance, and communication skills by developing five critical new competencies:

 

  • Product ownership
  • Customer-centric design
  • Communication
  • Digital governance
  • Data science

Each of these competencies is a combination of new roles, process changes, and cultural attitudes that combine to create a new approach to driving innovation. Don't think of these necessarily as standalone job positions or teams. Think of them as organizational capabilities that any high-performing digital team will need to master.

 

Our latest report, Five Killer Competencies Every Digital Team Needs To Build, outlines these new approaches, and we will be backing this up with further research over the next few weeks on how to recruit and retain top digital talent and how to make a few tactical changes to your organization and processes to encourage customer centric agility.

 

Watch this space.