Contents
According to the federal project “Personnel for the Digital Economy”, in our country there should be more than just developers and analysts, but also leaders of digital transformation. Tell us who they are
Who is a Digital Transformation Leader
The head of digital transformation or the head of digitalization is a senior manager. He is responsible for improving, correcting current processes and creating new products and directions using digital tools, methods from marketing and business intelligence.
The manager evaluates which technologies will allow the team to complete their tasks faster and better, develops a strategy for such changes and implements it together with the team. In order for the changes to take root, he changes or shapes the digital culture in the company, explains the benefits of using programs and gadgets so that all employees use them correctly. The average salary of digital transformation leaders in Moscow is from ₽600 thousand
Head of Digital Transformation — one of the professions of the future.
An important detail: there is a difference in how this position is abbreviated in our country and abroad. In Western countries, digital transformation tasks are performed much more often by CDO (Chief Digital Officer), and in our country – by CDTO (Chief Digital Transformation Officer).
Key Skills of a Digital Transformation Leader
Even if a CDTO has no development experience, it must know and understand how information systems, artificial intelligence, the IT landscape, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, and other technologies work. The skills of managing a remote team, managing changes, as well as understanding how to budget projects and evaluate their effectiveness will also come in handy.
Among soft skills, it is worth highlighting purposefulness, a high level of critical thinking, communication skills, and client-centricity. At the same time, the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation in 2020 has developed its own list of skills required from the CDTO for the public service.
Where does the profession come from?
In 2016 PwC calculated that 19% of 2,5 thousand large public companies have already hired a head of digital transformation. At the same time, 38% of the organizations that had this position in the state were from Europe, including Russia, as well as from the countries of the Middle East and Africa. Another 28% are from North America.
Most of them – 39% – have experience in marketing, sales and customer service, another 32% have a technical background. But COOs and CFOs can also fill the CDTO position.
Directions of the profession
It is difficult to survey all directions, since their set depends on the industry. However, Nikolai Verkhovsky, Executive Director of the Center for Digital Transformation of the Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, says that CDTO today has four key areas of work:
Changing business models from the sale of not a specific product or service, but a useful action. This model is called “everything as a service” (XaaS, Everything-as-a-Service). A good example is businesses that build product ecosystems around their brand: Sberbank, VK Group, Yandex, Tinkoff, MTS.
Transition to data-driven organizations. Such companies use big data to analyze business processes, the behavior of buyers and users on their resources, and then quickly customize them to the needs of the company and customers.
Restructuring of internal communications. In order for the company to have new digital solutions, they need to be invented, organized and then maintained in working condition. Because of this, such a direction as DevOps (Development and operations) appears. In addition, it will be necessary to restructure working communications in the direction of product thinking: there is a hypothesis, it is investigated, tested, the test results are analyzed, the product is changed and the cycle is started anew.
Transformation of corporate culture. It is not enough to come up with and introduce the first changes – it is necessary that all employees accept and use them.
Profession trends
If we talk about trends, then in the general forecast for the technological development of industries for 2022, the consulting company Deloitte identified several such technologies:
Targeted television advertising — targeted video advertising on Smart TV while watching content. Unlike the usual one, it is shown not to all viewers, but to the part that is interested in the topic that the business needs.
FWA — technology of fixed wireless access to the Internet, including the 5G standard.
Wi-Fi 6 is a new Wi-Fi standard that allows you to provide wireless Internet to both ordinary users and businesses.
floating solar panels – photovoltaic installations that can be kept on the water surface and thereby conduct electricity where it is impossible to mount land-based options.
Federated Machine Learning and Homomorphic Encryption for artificial intelligence – These technologies help to increase the security of working with sensitive data.
Dmitry Nikolin, director of the information technology department at Novavind (Rosatom), notes that the most difficult thing is to determine which technology is best suited for solving business problems.
Dmitry Nikolin:
“There is always a risk of believing in PR mailings about a particular development, and then spending millions on its implementation and getting dubious results. For example, there is now a growing demand for VR and related telecom solutions. In our case, it was about the fact that Moscow engineers could explain to any employee of the power plant in Stavropol where this or that wire is located at the facility. It sounds interesting, but those who proposed this technology did not take into account that in a hilly area there can be no stable reception of signals. An expensive solution could be useless.
But we use digital models of wind turbines with might and main, thanks to which we can calculate what will happen to the wind turbine at different air temperatures, wind speeds, and weather conditions. Now 80% of tests on new processes are carried out on a digital model of wind turbines, and this, in turn, increases the safety of components, assemblies, and also informs about the state of wind turbines in a particular mode of operation.”
Who Can Become a Digital Transformation Leader
Since this is a senior manager, it is quite difficult to become one without managerial experience. Furthermore, organizations require a minimum of two years of managerial experience to qualify for professional development or retraining. Part-time education for future CDTOs offered Center for Training of Leaders and Teams of the Central College of Higher School of Economics, RANEPA, Skolkovo, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Sber University. Abroad, you can get such education at INSEAD, IMD and other universities and business schools.
Similar training programs also appear on the platform “Digital Professions”. If you register through this platform, half of the cost of the course can be paid by the state. The course catalog changes regularly.
Others two free courses that give a general idea of how CDTO works are hosted on the Stepik platform.