On the Job by Anita Bruzzese Ignoring Digital Could Doom Your Career

On the Job by Anita Bruzzese Ignoring Digital Could Doom Your Career When it comes todigital transformation, companies are spending millions to ready their workforces for the future. Presentations and training sessions to employees stress how critical this transformation is if an organization wants to serve the customers and compete in a fast-paced marketplace. Yet in reality, many employees and those in the C-suite are simply nodding their heads while secretly thinking: This really has nothing to do with me. IT will figure it all out. That mindset is becoming more of a concern, especially since CEOs often are thinking the same thing. The problem is that while the tech staff can help research andadvise on a digital transformation, digital transformation will not be successful unless every single employee and every single leader understands it, embraces it and contributes to it. Further, business success depends on qualified leaders not ceding this responsibility to other workers who better grasp technology. Thats the underlying theme in a new ebook, Becoming Digital: Strategies for Business and Personal Transformation, by Knowledge@Wharton, the online research journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The research was sponsored by Mphasis, an IT services company. How big is thetechnology skills disconnect? Consider a KPMG survey that finds only 5% of CEOs and 3% of CIOs are leading the digital transformation at their companies. Nearly two-thirds of those survey respondents say they lack the necessary skills to put critical changes into play. That lack of knowledge is what leads many C-suite players into believing they can simply work around the technology, or just delegate digital transformation to others. Such a strategy is doomed to failure, the ebook reports, because this is a major upheaval in the business world that requires everyone to get on board. Fordigital transformationto truly work, it must begin with a commitment from the individual to change (read more here)