How To Manage Talent in Digital Transformation

The people working in any organization need specific skills, abilities, and knowledge that varies based on their positions. With the rapid pace of technological change, it can be challenging for the staff to keep up. This makes it difficult for the human resources department to match job profiles with individual skill sets.

Is it possible to have it all?

Long-standing vs. new organizations/companies

Most governmental organizations have been around for a long time. While this historical background is key to stability, it is not so helpful in building the specific skills required today.

The employees at many older institutions, both government and private, often range in age from 18 to 65 years or more. Some of them have been working at the same place for over 30 years. But it is not that common to find older workers in newer organizations. 

Is this a problem or actually an opportunity?

Not that old is bad and young is good, but both age groups have different ways of interacting with and reacting to our growing technological dependency. While younger employees were born in the internet age and are comfortable with an e-life, the more senior ones still rely on the traditional ways of working. However, some senior workers feel like a fish in a pond with the internet and know how to use new software. One way isn’t better than the other; they just entail different mental processes and mindsets. 

I consider this more of an opportunity than a challenge. Having a wide spectrum of profiles makes it possible to match staff members with a variety of job descriptions. If a new skill is required, it is always possible to train employees or even better, to create teams with the full skill set, moving the focus away from the individual to team functioning.

A historical perspective

For those who started work in environments where everything was on paper with the documents signed and stamped, today’s workplace looks different and challenging. The speed and the ease of communicating and finding documents is an improvement, but specific skills are required to work in this modern context.

While most countries around the world have joined the paperless trend, some areas remain unaware of this change. People working in some organizations still struggle to use software like Microsoft Word or Excel in a world that prefers data-driven decisions.

Is this because they are not interested, they weren’t trained or they don’t find it helpful?

Yes, and it is possible to address each of these:

• Not interested? Coach them to see their time at work as more than just a job to get a salary, and that such skills would make their life easier.
• Weren’t trained? Educate them! Providing short courses on specific software and  methodologies (e.g. maturity models) or topics like data quality can reap direct benefits for the organization and stimulate employees to do even more.
• Don’t find it useful? Show them the advantages of using the software at work, home, or wherever. Recognize their efforts and reward even the most minor achievements in the desired direction.

In any case, technology must be introduced gradually, step by step, allowing people to learn new skills comfortably. It is even more successful when the organization’s leadership, including the C-suite and senior staff, get directly involved in the change process. This makes it visible to everyone that the whole organization faces the same challenges, and shares the same values and long-term commitments to change.

The way ahead

Implementing a data management framework or reinforcing data-driven decision-making processes in organizations is similar to the grieving process. Workers may experience any of the stages at any given time.

Denial:  The staff has a great variety of profiles, but most are useless for the newly planned projects.

Anger:  What do we do with these people? How do we deal with this situation? They will never change!

Bargaining:  Shall we consider the pros and cons, and try to have an optimistic view? Are there any possible ways out of this?

Depression:  Oh my God! This is too much work!!! Is it worth the effort? 

Acceptance: We have this on our plate. Let's deal with it and find the right person for the right task. Let’s engage the whole team in this new way of working, invest in training and education, and then reward and recognize their progress. 

Final thoughts

An organization with different mindsets and experiences has greater potential to succeed because of the variety of perspectives that contributes to decision-making.

An engaged and committed team achieves better results than a group of experts, emphasizing team over individual skills. Progressing step by step, leading by example, and using maturity models to design, plan and demonstrate results to every employee is critical to any organization's long-term success.

Author Bio: Maria J. Espona, Biologist (1994), Master en Terrorism Studies (2013) and Doctor in Criminology (2019). She is an expert in the WMD field, especially in the CBW arena and export control. She has several publications on those topics. She teaches in Postgraduate Courses Science and Technology and Disarmament, Research Methodologies, Information Quality and Intelligence in Argentina and Peru.

Since 2021, she has served as the Ambassador to Argentina at isCDO, CDOIQ and CDO Magazine.

She is the Director ArgIQ, Argentina Information Quality, a nonprofit civil association created in 2011, whose objective is to disseminate, through academic activities, the information quality methodology in Argentina and Spanish-speaking countries.