Digital Business Transformation in Latin America
“Talent is the fundamental “infrastructure” required for Digital Transformation.”
This is an extract of the report by the gA Center for Digital Business Transformation in Latin America (CdBT), the business and strategy research center of Grupo ASSA, was established to explore and study the impact of digital technologies on large companies in Latin America.
People, more than any other resource is the key to a successful digital business transformation. New skills and capabilities are going to be needed to compete in the long-term, but the winners will be those firms that are successful in managing the convergence of strategy, new technologies, business processes and their human capital.
We define talent development as the capacity to groom existing human capital combined with the capacity to find and bring in the new skills where needed.
The key Talent areas to think about in the context of Digital Transformation are five:
Flexibility: Digital technologies are evolving at high speed and in very dynamic formats.
Therefore, it makes no sense to create cadres of highly focused specialists: they will be outdated in no time.
Create flexible professionals, with a strong and well-rounded university education. And then train them for a specific technology, and they will always respond positively. Latin American professionals are well-known for their flexibility and superior ability to innovate
Diversity: To achieve a successful digital transformation team, multiple kinds of skills will be required, including not only IT related skills, but others as Process Innovation, Digital Marketing, Customer Experience and Business/ Financial expertise. Some of these you may need to fetch outside of the company, and in some cases an alliance with a technology boutique or even a tactical acquisition may be the solution. New forms of collaboration and communication: The digital challenge is not only about individual skills: you need to develop and build new ways of collaboration, to create multi-disciplinary teams, and organize innovation and design thinking workshops. Look deep inside your organization to find the talent you need to compete in the Digital Economy. This is a good opportunity to bring in outside specialists in Change Management, to help produce the necessary changes that are usually hard to do from within.
Creative Thinking & Innovation: Push innovation down into the middle and lower levels of the organization: create innovation anarchy (at least some form of managed anarchy!).
Final thoughts: Give your staff a free hand. build co-creation interdisciplinary teams, enabling the innovation process, with a collaborative and iterative method to develop and implement the new digital initiatives. Create the incentives and the rewards to make People Transformation come alive from within. Innovation is about creating something new, but starting from what you already have: Leverage your core assets to create new models, new ways of using technology.
Read the full report here.
