On a national and international level, there is a trend of companies setting up specific organizational tools in order to make the adaptation to the new business models required by a social and economic context that has evolved rapidly more fluid and faster. But what is a Digital Transformation Advisory Board and how does it work?
It is essentially a committee with no administrative tasks and that meets at a certain frequency to discuss issues related to digital transformation working in a fluid and functional way to the needs of the company
How it works
An important moment of exchange is created within which the company's top management interacts and exchanges information with qualified experts from the digital and tech world. The aim is to better understand the movement of a specific market and the tools available thanks to digital and technology in order to support the company in making the most informed decisions possible.
Why it is useful
The speed of social and economic development in recent years due to digital and technology has been so high that it does not allow management to update their skills through the canonical tools available. On the contrary, those who possess these new digital and tech skills have not yet reached through experience a managerial maturity that would allow them to reliably and professionally govern established companies and their ecosystem of stakeholders. The solution to this dilemma, which will be a topical issue for years to come, can be glimpsed in the long term in the natural convergence of these two different professional figures, but it can already be achieved today through the construction of a dialogue based on the proper integration of all skills.
How to set it up correctly
The most delicate phase in the life of a Digital Transformation Advisory Board is its establishment. In order to make it an effective tool, in fact, it is necessary to integrate the skills of very different participants. This poses the challenge of knowing how to extract value, at the same time, from elements of continuity with the past and from elements that are instead discontinuous, where both, however, reside within the experience of each individual person.
The Elements of Continuity are fundamental in order to constitute the common ground of dialogue and mutual esteem between very different actors, such as managers with experience in established companies and "digital native" experts/entrepreneurs. These are for example:
- professional seriousness combined with the ability to be self-critical about one's vision and beliefs
- in-depth understanding of a company's needs and industry dynamics
- sharing the corporate vision
- …
The Elements of Discontinuity are the real value, which allows to increase the information assets of all the interlocutors present at the table, and consequently constitute a unicum with a more informed view of a given reality placed in the current context
- different backgrounds and experiences
- different skills
- different worldview
- different language and way of expressing oneself
- …
It is not always easy to build this kind of team: it often happens that a manager tends to have little critical spirit towards his own vision of the market compared to the real behavior of the market, while the "digital natives" on the contrary do not have an adequate level of professionalism and managerial experience that is necessary to effectively manage an organization, or even just to interact with it.
The most delicate point is therefore the choice of the right team of people. It is important to know how to perfectly blend the elements of continuity and discontinuity brought by each person at the table in order to originate a constructive dialogue and allow the diversity of backgrounds of the interlocutors to become a real value to be exploited for the company.
