You can't 'get digital' if you don't 'get' digital

The latest Australian Digital Inclusion Index highlighted that Australians are spending increasing amounts of time and doing more online, but that businesses currently lack the ability to capitalise on these changes, falling further and further behind consumers’ expectations. Some of the key barriers highlighted were skills, attitudes and knowledge.

These three things may sound simple to rectify in theory, but businesses often underestimate their complexity and the resources required to successfully overcome them. Adding to this, in our own recent survey of 150 Australian business leaders, only 45% said that their business is ‘very receptive’ to innovation, with 10% responding that they are ‘not very’ or ‘not receptive at all’. Furthermore, only just over a third (37%) think their company is currently taking advantage of the way the digital world is moving.

Top-down, but customer in mind

Often the biggest pains and inefficiencies associated with outdated processes are felt at the junior levels. Although they can be difficult to convey to senior management, the pain is manifested to those managers in other ways: negative customer experiences and reviews, struggling revenues, growing competition from more digitally savvy competitors and more.

To bridge the gap between those who are living and breathing the work and the executive team who are simply judging its success through KPIs, there needs to be an understanding among senior management of how digital technologies can be used throughout the business and the effect they can have on the company’s goals and objectives.

Once this understanding is in place, open communication channels need to be established to ensure senior management has clear insights into how those digital goals can then be met.

With every digitally led decision, it is critical for businesses to keep the customer as the focus at all times. This will ensure that investments or resource allocations for new technologies will not be merely for the purpose of ‘going digital’, but rather to improve customer experience, retention or spend.

Stop talking, start walking

It’s easy for businesses to blame the rapid pace of change for their own inability to keep up. However, changes also bring significant opportunities for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Skills are a good example. Digital skills are undeniably high in demand, low in supply and increasingly required to make a business digital-first. Simultaneously, there are more online courses, training programs and mentorships available today that specialise in the exact skills required of your staff.

Furthermore, the number of consultancies and agencies specialising in these fields has mushroomed; finding the right one for your needs is a matter of investing time in the short term to improve productivity in the long term.

When exploring these options, leaders need to assess whether the skills they are seeking will contribute to the running of their core areas of business, or not. If the latter, outsourcing is undeniably the best option to achieving fast and sustainable results — leave it to the experts while you focus on what you do best.

Leaders need to take a holistic view of their businesses, the changing landscape of their industry and the rise of competitors to understand how they can start ‘walking the walk’ rather than just talking about problems and solutions.

Leaders also need to be proactive, rather than reactive, to customers’ demands. This doesn’t necessarily need to involve having the best digital talents working for you, though they do need to be on hand and able to work towards clear, forward-thinking and customer-centric digital goals. Start by agreeing at the executive level what those goals should be, and then you can grow a digital-first culture.

Pictured: John-Paul Syriatowicz

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