Like the chief automobile officer, the chief telephone officer, the chief electricity officer, if the chief digital officer is doing her job properly, the silo disappears and the concept is integrated into every facet of the organization's being. JL
Theo Priestly comments in Forbes:
Digital isn’t merely a thing—it’s a new way of doing things. Many companies are focused on developing a digital strategy when they should instead focus on integrating digital into all aspects of the business, from channels and processes and data to the operating model, incentives, and culture
A few years ago I was working as Chief Technology Evangelist at a recognised software vendor, whose mantra at that time was geared towards the ‘Digital Enterprise’. Fast forward to today and even the likes of Steve Lucas, the global president of the SAP Platform Solutions Group, has been spotted saying almost the same marketing line; “The reality is, if you want to participate in the digital economy – any digital economy – you must become a Digital Enterprise.”
The thing is, the word Digital has been around for decades now, and even the term Digital Economy is something that was first coined in 1995 by Don Tapscott in his best-seller “The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence”. While it has become the fashion for analysts and vendors to place the word Digital in front of traditional terms we already know, the reality is that deep down it does not fundamentally alter how we conduct business, manage transformation, or look at how we engage with our customers. Which explains why it has become so hard to both define the Chief Digital Officer role and fulfil the position.
According to the Financial Times, the CDO role can command upwards of £500,000 as companies clamber to find the right talent. “The job involves looking for business opportunities that have been enabled by the digital revolution. It also involves focusing on customers and how their needs might change because of technological developments.” claims the FT. Shouldn’t be too hard to find someone like this then, especially with a carrot of that size as a salary.
Consider the definition in Wikipedia: “A Chief Digital Officer (CDO) is an individual who helps a company, a government organisation or a city drive growth by converting traditional ”analog” businesses to digital ones, and oversees operations in the rapidly changing digital sectors like mobile applications, social media and related applications, virtual goods, as well as “wild” web-based information management and marketing.”
Therein lies the problem: Even when loosely defined the digital role is performed by the Chief Customer Officer, Chief Innovation Officer or Chief Technology Officer. There is also overlap with the Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Operating Officer. Talk about stepping on every toe in the C-suite…such an overlay type role indicates that the position’s functions and responsibilities are already distributed among different areas within the C-suite, and are already deeply entrenched in all aspects of a company’s culture.
In fact, Bob Fecteau, Chief Information Officer for SAIC, stated in a recent article that ”Efforts to separate job responsibilities of the CIO like these serve to dilute the authority, the budget and the scope of the CIO’s responsibility.”
Gartner cites that 90% of the technology budget will sit outside of the realm of the CIO by 2020…we’re now in 2016 and the needle hasn’t budged anywhere near that direction.
Which begs the question, why does it need to exist ?
According to PwC, the number of companies that have already hired CDOs remains small — just 6% globally out of the top 1,500 organisations.
IDC said that 60% of CIOs will be replaced by CDOs for the delivery of IT-enabled products and digital services by 2020, and Gartner claimed that 25% would have a CDO by 2015 but these are ludicrous claims in the light of such small numbers that are in existence in 2016 today. McKinsey also states that “Digital isn’t merely a thing—it’s a new way of doing things. Many companies are focused on developing a digital strategy when they should instead focus on integrating digital into all aspects of the business, from channels and processes and data to the operating model, incentives, and culture.” and yet rather than advise how to embed a digital culture across the entire organisation we instead need a new role that’s pivotal to that strategy.
Blanket role responsibility statements such as “ensuring that the company’s key strategies are supported by emerging technologies and new organisational competencies” also don’t help support the case for a separate role in the CDO.
If you look at the common requirements and traits defined as part of a CDO role they can be pretty much found across the entire organisation everywhere else:
Stick the word Digital in front of any role – Now we need multiple types of CDO according to Gartner
Debra Logan, a Gartner VP and fellow stated that digital leadership is an adaptation of business leadership to a digital context. But replace the term digital with any other word and you get the same result; a role with no real meaning outside of a painful transition phase we are all suffering at the hands of analysts looking for a new yet unwanted leader to advise. Rob Preston, Editor-in-chief at InformationWeek said that by 2020 the CDO role will disappear along with the other fad titles. I’m inclined to say it’ll be a lot sooner once business leaders understand that the Chief Digital Officer is a role born from the apparent need to fulfil responsibilities that are accountable and delivered by each of the C-suite separately in their own duties.
- Be a champion of innovation
- Be a champion of transformation
- Be a champion of the customer
- Be a champion of agility
- Be a champion of collaboration
- Be a champion of marketing
Rather than spend £500,000 trying to recruit a CDO, the CEO would be better advised to make sure that the rest of the team, including themselves, are more aligned as a cohesive leadership unit to define and execute a strategy for the customer and economy we live in today.
And you don’t need to stick the word digital at the front to deliver the results.
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