The majority of business leaders (84 per cent) acknowledge that artificial intelligence (AI) is important to the future success of their company but lack of skilled personnel remains a significant barrier, a new EY study finds.
Despite the opportunities that the C-suite recognises in AI, nearly one in three respondents rank lack of skilled personnel (31 per cent) as one of the two greatest organisational/people barriers to AI adoption in their company.
More than three fifths of respondents (62 per cent) said that AI will have a major impact on creating efficiencies at their company and remaining competitive. A similar figure (60 per cent) reckon it will lead to better understanding of customers.
In addition, 55 per cent of respondents believe AI will have a major impact on reducing costs and driving new revenues.
Behind skilled personnel, other key organisational barriers include lack of compelling return on investment (27 per cent), lack of management understanding (24 per cent), unclear business case (21 per cent), limited funding (20 per cent) and siloed data and organisation (19 per cent).
EY reports that these findings are consistent with the results of a survey it conducted in collaboration with MIT Technology Review where nearly half (45 per cent) of 112 senior business and technology decision-makers reported that their organisations lack the skilled personnel needed to implement AI.
This was followed by a lack of clear business case for the technology (34 per cent).
It underscores the importance of C-suite buy-in, both in informing the organisation of AI’s uses, value and ROI, as well as outlining the benefits of long-term implementation
Despite the hurdles that business leaders have faced in AI implementation, there are several key factors that can make the difference in an organisation’s ability to overcome these barriers, according to EY.
The two most important factors cited by business leaders are having a compelling business case for AI (31 per cent) and having a clear strategic vision and commitment to AI from senior management (29 per cent).
This underscores the importance of C-suite buy-in, both in informing the organisation of AI’s uses, value and ROI, as well as outlining the benefits of long-term implementation, notes EY.
“CEOs and business leaders have a responsibility to not only motivate and inspire their organisations with a strategic vision for the future, but to establish a plan that implements AI and other emerging technologies across the workforce,” said Jeff Wong, global chief innovation officer, EY.
“Employees need to be able to trust the technologies and understand the benefits and efficiencies that AI provides personally and for the business.”
Rialto director, Richard Chiumento, sits on the All-Parliamentary Party Group on Artificial Intelligence, which was set up with the aim of exploring the impact and implications of AI and leaders. Commenting on the report, he said the findings underline many of the challenges businesses face when implementing AI but they must be confronted immediately.
“Dedicating resource to finding skilled personnel or investing in development and training lies at the heart of many of these other challenges,” he said. “The organisations that invest in building their capability and plugging knowledge gaps in this area now will be far better placed to address them and any future challenges that AI throws up.”
Half of today’s leaders feel ill-equipped to take on their expanded roles and lead their organisation in the future, a new study finds.
To tackle this crises of confidence, Gartner’s Reshaping Leadership to Prepare for the Future report suggests HR leaders should create an environment built on “complementary leadership”. This is described as the “intentional partnership” between groups of leaders to share responsibilities based on complementary skillsets.
“We are seeing organisations overhaul their leadership models, hoping the right combination of competencies will enable leaders to tackle their growing responsibilities,” said Sari Wilde, managing vice president in the Gartner HR practice. “Unfortunately, relying on leadership models alone isn’t enough.”
She continued: “Our research found that leaders are not always best-positioned to manage every responsibility they are tasked with; instead, the best leaders identify others who have a stronger grasp of skills at which they are weak and share responsibilities with them.”
According to Gartner, complementary leadership can provide a big boost to leaders’ performance. Its analysis indicated leaders who use complementary leadership saw a 60 per cent increase in their teams’ performance and a 40 per cent increase in their own performance.
The performance gains highlighted in the research are impressive and show what a difference such an approach can make to the bottom line
Leaders need to know their current level of skills proficiency so they can prioritise what they need to develop and where they need help. Today’s leadership assessments can be misleading because they don’t include the right inputs and prioritise results based on the wrong metrics.
Rather than evaluating leaders against organisation-wide metrics that are too broad, leaders should focus on identifying locally relevant development priorities, the analyst noted.
HR leaders can serve as the catalyst to help leaders identify and make the most of partnerships. Rather than waiting for individual leaders to develop all of the necessary skills, HR must help them find the right partners to share their responsibilities, particularly in the face of filling urgent skill needs, added Gartner.
These leader partnerships allow each leader to specialise in core skills, develop much needed skills and lead in critical areas. This type of partnering, reportedly, can increase leaders’ skill preparedness by 54 per cent.
Richard Chiumento, director of Rialto Consultancy, said that the findings align with the shift towards far more collaborative leadership and there can be no doubt that complementary leadership suits the current business environment. “At a time when much is being demanded of leaders, no single person can have all the answers,” he said. “The performance gains highlighted in the research are impressive and show what a difference such an approach can make to the bottom line.”
Cyber, cyber security and cyber risk management are in the headlines almost daily. In the context of countries hacking countries, data breaches through data theft, States and companies being held to ransom or individuals having personal data stolen and published online. We live in what many call the 4th industrial revolution, in a society which has become dependent upon the consumption of data and use of information and technology. In developed economies, governments, organisations and individuals rely upon technology platforms, data and information to manufacture and sell products and services, provide healthcare and manage financial transactions. To deliver basic services like gas, water or electricity, to access online banking, hail a taxi or to purchase a film to watch on the mobile phone. Data has become a commodity and if the flow of data and information are disrupted, trade flows slow or stop. What happens if you have power, but you disrupt the flow of information and data? With no data how do you distribute food if you cannot get the message to the distribution centre? How do you pay for shopping at the grocery store, how do you withdraw money from the ATM and how do banks transfer money between each other globally? Alongside the growth in data consumption and our reliance upon the use of technologies such as the internet, mobile communications and digital. The cyber threat has grown.
Cyber-attacks, a global problem everyone is talking about. The World Economic Forum (WEF) annual report of global risks places cyber-attack as one of the top 5 risks behind extreme weather events, failure of climate-change mitigation and adaptation, natural disasters and data fraud or theft. With the potential to have a significant global economic impact in the next 10 years. Cyber-attacks are a geopolitical weapon with countries targeting countries, countries targeting corporations and countries targeting individuals. The use of cyber as a weapon of warfare is gaining prominence, nation states are targeting power networks or using cyber to support conventional military campaigns. Cyber-attacks are a well-run criminal activity.
The global cost of cybercrime is estimated in the region of $600Bn
The global impact of cyber-attacks is estimated at 0.8% of global GDP and rising. It is more profitable than drugs and people trafficking combined and with the source of cyber-attacks being difficult to detect, harder to prosecute. Cyber is a well-managed economy with its own structures for the targeting of nation states, corporations and individuals. With an ecosystem for the trading of personal data, the buying and selling code to illicit cyber-attacks, the buying and selling of cyber-attacks (Cyber as a Service) and the trading of intellectual property (IP) and private information.
Cyber risks, can significantly impact the balance sheet. This makes cyber a significant risk to understand and manage across a company. NotPetya was a global cyber-attack which took place in 2017.
The global cost of NotPetya has been estimated in excess of $3Bn
The companies it impacted suffered considerable damage, Maersk reported losses of around $300Mn and Merck of over $800Mn. Costs which impacted both the top and bottom line. such as the costs to fix the issues identified in the attack, communicating and compensating customers, lost revenues and sales, the associated brand and reputational damage and the on-going legal costs. The legal fallout of a cyber-attack can run for several years and the impact to corporate brand will never disappear. Target, a well-known US retailer has not lost the reputation it gained following its cyber-attack in 2013. The attack on Talk-Talk in 2015, still warranted column inches in the UK national press in June 2019. There is growing evidence that the share price of companies is affected by a cyber-attack and credit rating agencies are running programmes to evaluate the impact of cyber security on credit scoring, which will have a direct impact on the cost of credit for companies in the financial markets.
British Airways and Marriott Hotels with intentions to be fined a combined £282Mn for data breaches
Cyber risk management, firmly on the board table with the balance sheet. Cyber now sits on the board table and the long-term prognosis for cyber and the board is clear. Cyber as a risk is not going away, it will only become a more significant risk as the digital economy grows. The cost of regulatory compliance will increase, with regulators from many sectors focusing on cyber risk management. The ICO recently released enforced EU GDPR regulation, with intentions to fine both British Airways and Marriott hotels for data breaches in 2018, fines which I am sure their legal teams will be negotiating.
To find out more about cyber risk management and what the board should know contact: Andy Watkin-Child Or Richard Chiumento on 020 30438645
Four fifths of executives and their companies are supply chain ‘laggards’ missing opportunities to leverage the power of the supply chain to create new value, according to a report.
The study by Accenture revealed only one fifth (22 per cent) of companies are capitalising efforts in three areas – digital investments, customer-centricity and ecosystems. This is enabling them to shift their supply chain strategy from driving cost efficiencies to fuelling sustained growth and achieving competitive agility.
Meanwhile, laggards need to quickly transform the supply chain and operations function into a “collaborative engine of growth and innovation” or else they risk their future success, Accenture warns.
“We’ve discovered that a small set of companies have supply chain and operations executives who are using digital with a purpose and collaborating across the C-suite, and other business functions, to create and implement customer-centric strategies that enable growth,” said Don Schulman, senior managing director in Accenture’s supply chain and operations group.
“As a result, the supply chain and operations executives at these companies are taking a more influential role at the board table and adding a new unique perspective.”
While most supply chain and operations executives recognise the benefits of digital technologies, Accenture’s study found ‘leaders’ actively infuse digital intelligence throughout their supply chains and operating models.
The report notes that leaders’ approach to customer centricity is to have a “laser focus” on customers and put them at the centre of everything. They recognise that each C-suite member can benefit from the insights that are generated across the supply chain and operations and enable the entire company to become more customer-centric.
That puts chief operating officers (COOs) and chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) in a unique position to help accelerate collaboration that leads to customer-fuelled growth.
Laggards need to quickly transform the supply chain and operations function into a “collaborative engine of growth and innovation” or else they risk their future success
The majority of both leaders (78 per cent) and laggards (64 per cent) embrace the idea of becoming ecosystem orchestrators. However, leaders look beyond traditional partners like suppliers and recognise that technology partners, universities, innovation incubators, start-ups and even competitors can help drive relevant new offerings to customers as quickly as possible.
This is a game-changing realisation, not just for COOs and CSCOs, but also for their C-suite counterparts, according to the report, offering an opportunity to transform what was previously known as a support function into a growth engine.
Accenture conducted a global survey of 1,350 executives for the report: From inventory to influencer: the mover becomes the shaker.
Commenting on the findings, Rialto Consultancy director, Richard Chiumento, reckons that leaders within some organisations are not as alert as they should be to identifying new opportunities for growth.
“They must change their mindsets to identify traditional cost centres where digital technologies and intelligence can change the dynamic and fuel growth.”
One quarter of organisations (23 per cent), which are already piloting or using artificial intelligence (AI), are doing so in the HR and recruiting domain to improve efficiency and enhance employee experience, a study finds.
Typically, AI is applied across areas such as talent management, HR service delivery and workforce management, according to Gartner’s AI Enterprise Perceptions, Plans and Implementation survey.
“Often, organisations demonstrate the use of AI in the HR domain after having showed value in other business areas,” said Helen Poitevin, research vice president at Gartner. “In the human capital management domain, AI applications dominate in employee- and candidate-facing situations.”
In the study, three common use cases of AI in HR and recruiting were identified:
1 Talent acquisition
Organisations with a very high volume of candidates, or those struggling to find specialists or other rare profiles, are likely to invest in AI technologies. “Overall, AI applications can analyse and interpret candidates’ responses and predict candidates’ degree of fit and performance for current vacancies and other potential roles,” continued Poitevin.
“AI applications should also be able to take over repetitive administrative tasks and enable recruiters to focus on strategic tasks.”
2 Voice of the employee
Voice of the employee (VoE) seek to improve how they monitor employee engagement.
Instead of relying solely on surveys, HR leaders are also interested in detecting, analysing and reporting on sentiment and attitudes as expressed across more employee communication channels.
For example, they may look at employees’ social media feeds, or conversations and comments in internal collaboration tools.
No-one has all the answers at the moment when it comes to how we extract maximum value from these tools so we are all on a learning curve
The goal is to identify what people are talking about positively or negatively, and which topics are most frequently raised. Some leading organisations use this kind of input to track the health of their corporate culture.
Modern VoE tools that capitalise on AI technologies use a variety of natural language processing and textual analysis techniques to analyse sentiment and get insights from text-based answers. This can be especially useful in times of significant change, such as a major restructuring, new leadership or a new strategy.
3 HR virtual assistants
HR virtual assistants are still in a stage of early adoption. However, the expectation is that there will be a “unique front end” for every imaginable HR process. This could, for instance, encompass answering queries by employees, delivering insights on talent metrics, or conducting process workflow steps.
When developing investment in HR virtual assistants, HR leaders should start small, Gartner advises. “Kick off with a simple automated FAQ on help-desk-related questions and give the organisation a few years to develop an effective assistant,” added Poitevin.
Commenting on the findings, Rialto Consultancy (more…)
Already challenged C-suite leaders are facing intense pressure from an emerging ‘supergroup’ of employees and consumers that demands a fresh approach to leadership, new research finds.
With three-quarters of these powerful stakeholders (73 per cent) believing they have the potential to destroy company value in the long term, it is vital the C-suite understands the need to respond, the study warns.
The Whole-Brain Leadership: the new rules of engagement for the C-suite report from Accenture Strategy identifies a new influential group of stakeholders with the power to either destabilise or uplift businesses.
Dubbed the ‘pathfinders’, they share a common mindset about how leadership needs to change.
Pathfinders are five times more likely to take action in numbers against their employers, and three-fifths (61 per cent) report they have already taken disruptive action by voicing their disappointment as a customer.
Four-fifths of pathfinders say that social media has increased the power of their voice in the companies where they work, and 71 per cent say it has enabled them to influence the behaviour of the companies they buy from.
“Pressures are compounding on the C-suite like never before. The complexity and intensity of disruption is challenging executives to transform leadership styles and strategies on their journey to achieve competitive agility,” said Mark Knickrehm, group chief executive, Accenture Strategy.
Pathfinders are demanding a new type of leader to engage their passion and capabilities, one that has a strong balance of human-centered and analytics-led skills. This “whole-brain” approach balances ‘left’ (scientific) brain skills with increasingly valued ‘right’ (creative) brain skills, such as empathy, innovation and intuition.
They clearly have energy and ideas about what organisations should be doing so the leadership challenge is to harness this and turn it to the company’s advantage”
The majority (89 per cent) of today’s C-suite hold business school, science or technology degrees and have honed left-brain skills – such as critical reasoning, decision-making and results-orientation.
While these skills will always be valuable, according to Accenture, C-suite leaders must recognise the need to strengthen their right-brain skills for a well-rounded whole-brain skillset. Two thirds say that right-brain skills are their weakest and only 8 per cent report their organisations are using a whole-brain approach.
In today’s volatile business environment, this balance is no longer an option, cautions Accenture. The companies that have already adopted a whole-brain approach see a positive bottom-line impact and realise, on average, 22 per cent higher revenue growth and 34 per cent higher profitability, the report notes.
The report is based on interviews with 200 C-suite executives across the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and US and surveyed more than 11,000 employees and consumers in China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and US.
Commenting on the research, Rialto Consultancy director Richard Chiumento welcomed the insight the report provides on this emerging group of people. “They clearly have energy and ideas about what organisations should be doing so the leadership challenge is to harness this and turn it to the company’s advantage,” he said. “This will require a different type of leadership style and leaders must listen to what they have to say and be receptive to implementing their ideas.”
With cutting-edge technology fast becoming a necessity in today’s business environment, boards must step up to the challenge of managing the ethical risks of artificial intelligence (AI), a new report advises.
Corporate Ethics in a Digital Age, released by the Institute of Business Ethics (IBE), sets out to examine the expertise that is required in the boardroom. It also offers practical advice about how the ethical challenges of AI can be addressed.
According to the IBE, boards need to consider the application of technology as integral to their discussions on risk appetite and risk management.
The board briefing report presents nine challenges around the use of AI and suggests questions for boardroom members to help address these challenges. Among the challenges are the following: avoiding bias; treating customers, employees and contractors fairly; dealing with cyber-attacks; and keeping data secure.
“Boards not only have to manage a new set of risks and opportunities. They do so in a world that is rapidly changing in ways that make it harder for them to exercise control, but they cannot duck the issue,” said Peter Montagnon, associate director of the IBE and author of the report.
He continued: “At their core these challenges fall naturally into board responsibility for risk appetite and risk oversight. They should not be ignored or put in a silo just because technology is complicated. Most of the key decisions are actually about how technology is applied, with the dilemmas being primarily philosophical and ethical.”
“This is very much a modern boardroom issue and one that must be prioritised, not put on the back burner”
The briefing noted that directors need to be able to ask the right questions, insist on answers they can understand and set limits. Boards also need to understand what and how technology contributes. The report added that while they need access to good advice, business experience, common sense and sound advice remain critical for directors.
Case studies are used to highlight the real-world dilemmas which boards are facing. The report also suggests that directors should ensure they are confident in the ability of their chief information officer or chief technology officer to give them the sound advice they need.
“Boards have to decide where to draw the line between the opportunities of using technology to further business objectives and the risk of inadequate controls which end up infringing individual rights or otherwise endangering the company’s reputation,” added Montagnon.
Commenting on the research findings, Rialto Consultancy director Richard Chiumento stressed that boards must take the trouble to fully understand the risks associated with technologies such as AI and some may not be immediately obvious.
“We are in a period of great change and board members must continually evaluate the impact new and emerging technologies will have on all areas of the business and identify where risks may come from today and in the future,” he said. “This is very much a modern boardroom issue and one that must be prioritised, not put on the back burner.”
A lack of in-house talent and poor access to the right technologies and useful data is impeding the progress of artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, a new study finds.
While most organisations are fully invested in AI, more than half (51 per cent) don’t have the required in-house skilled talent to execute their strategy, according to research from SnapLogic.
The study found that 93 per cent of UK and US organisations consider AI to be a business priority and have projects planned or already in production.
However, insufficient skilled talent was cited as the number one barrier to progressing their AI initiatives.
This was followed by lack of budget (32 per cent), access to the right technologies and tools (28 per cent), and access to useful data (26 per cent), considered to be key issues holding them back.
When asked where organisations are in their AI-machine learning (ML) journey, three-quarters of organisations (74 per cent) in the US and UK have initiated an AI project during the past three years, with the US leading the UK at 78 per cent compared to two-thirds uptake.
In the UK, this in-house skill shortage is considerably more acute, with three-quarters (73 per cent) of IT decision-makers (ITDMs) lacking the necessary talent compared to two-fifths (41 per cent) in the US.
To build the right AI team, more than two-thirds of ITDMs (68 per cent) said they are investing in retraining and upskilling existing employees.
Much like people, these tools won’t be allowed to fulfil their potential or help achieve the organisation’s goals unless the organisation has the right talent and capabilities in place to extract maximum value from them
Three fifths of ITDMs (58 per cent) indicated they are identifying and recruiting skilled talent from other companies and organisations, while half (49 per cent) reckon that recruiting from universities is important to getting an effective AI team in place.
The priority skills and attributes that organisations are looking for in their AI team are coding, programming, and software development (35 per cent), with data visualisation and analytics considered to be a priority by one-third of ITDMs.
For organisations to accelerate their AI initiatives, they must upskill and recruit the right talent and invest in new technology and tools,” said Gaurav Dhillon, CEO at SnapLogic.
“Today’s self-service and low-code technologies can help bridge the gap, effectively democratising AI and machine learning by getting these transformative capabilities into the hands of more workers at every skill level, thus moving the modern enterprise into the age of automation.”
Commenting on the findings of the research, Richard Chiumento, director of Rialto Consultancy, said it is more evidence of too many organisations putting investment in technology ahead of people. “We are talking about an extremely powerful set of technologies but, much like people, these tools won’t be allowed to fulfil their potential or help achieve the organisation’s goals unless the organisation has the right talent and capabilities in place to extract maximum value from them.”
The study was conducted by research house Vanson Bourne on behalf of SnapLogic. Some 300 ITDMs participated in the study, representing organisations with more than 1,000 employees across the UK and US.
Digital competencies have become vital to achieving business goals but ‘notable’ gaps exist and IT departments need to evolve in order to keep pace with digital transformation, new research warns.
Eight in 10 senior business and government leaders say digital competencies are either very or extremely important to achieving their organisational goals.
But according to the Benchmarking competencies for digital performance survey, three-fifths of respondents (57 per cent) report their organisations are struggling to achieve important goals because they lack key digital competencies.
These goals included, among other things, revenue growth, service quality, mission delivery, profit growth/cost reduction, user experience and customer satisfaction.
The EIU report is based on a survey of more than 500 senior business and government leaders across the world. It focused on assessing nine behaviours, skills and abilities that help organisations improve their digital performance and, ultimately, achieve their objectives.
The survey reveals a shared awareness among businesses that digital transformation is necessary to achieve their goals and remain competitive. As well as struggling to achieve important goals because they lack digital competencies, notably, two-thirds of respondents say that their digital-competency gaps have negatively affected user experience. This explains why almost half of respondents say they need to significantly improve digital experience management.
“The message is loud and clear to leaders: invest in your people and yourselves to make sure you have the skills required to ensure the business is fit for the future.”
The study also notes the central importance that companies place on improved digital competency despite the fact that some firms have yet to achieve meaningful results.
One third of organisations surveyed report only neutral or no measurable benefits from their digital strategies. Issues appear especially problematic in the public sector, with three-fifths of private sector respondents describing their IT modernisation and transformation as advanced, compared with less than half in the public sector (45 per cent).
In terms of overcoming this capability gap, the IT function plays a pivotal role, the study points out. High performers are aware that IT must be agile, as four-fifths (78 per cent) cite IT infrastructure modernisation and transformation as their top digital competency for achieving their goals.
In addition, enabling greater communication and collaboration between IT and the rest of the organisation (where digital competencies may be scarce) can significantly improve digital performance and user experience.
Commenting on the findings, Richard Chiumento, director of Rialto Consultancy, stressed that the research clearly shows a lack of digital skills is impeding organisations from achieving goals that directly affect the bottom line, such as revenue and profit growth. “The message is loud and clear to leaders: invest in your people and yourselves to make sure you have the skills required to ensure the business is fit for the future,” he said.
The Benchmarking competencies for digital performance study by the Economist Intelligent Unit (EIU) was commissioned by Riverbed.
Most HR organisations remain behind the curve in addressing an “array of areas” that are critical to helping the enterprise achieve its goals, a new study warns.
These areas include developing executives who can lead in volatile environments and supporting enterprise digital transformation.
The 2019 “key issues” research from the Hackett Group, found that while some progress on improving key capabilities have been made these have largely been slow to come by and gaps remain.
While some key development areas are targeted for improvement in 2019, others, like finding solutions to skills shortages, retaining key staff, and strategy execution, are not likely to receive the attention they need.
Despite rising stakeholder expectations, progress may be hampered by the expectations of flat HR budgets and headcounts.
To help resolve these shortfalls and achieve next-generation HR capability, many organisations are engaging in digital transformation, embracing the adoption of emerging technology.
Yet only a third of HR organisations report that digital transformation has had a high impact on helping them attain enterprise objectives or significantly improved their service delivery models and performance, the research found.
When it comes to digital transformation, HR must understand it is about people and talent as much, if not more so, than technology and ensure they take a far more central role in such programmes
But this is expected to improve dramatically over the next two to three years, as the pace of digital technology adoption increases. HR is expecting to see the most substantial gains in areas that include modernising core ERP platforms (42 per cent adoption growth), robotic process automation (2.5x growth), data visualisation tools (59 per cent growth), and virtual digital assistants/chatbots (2.4x growth).
In terms of its ability to support the enterprise, the research found that HR organisations say they have “low ability” to address issues in five critical areas. Three of these enterprise priorities have remained consistent: developing executives who can lead in volatile environments; enabling successful business strategy execution; and enabling digital transformation. Two are new to the top five list this year – support for enterprise customer-centricity and the ability to address talent and skills shortages.
HR’s planned improvement initiatives for 2019 also reveal significant cause for concern, the research found, as it does not appear to be mobilising against many of the highest cited priorities.
Only some of the improvement priorities and development areas that have been identified are among the top initiatives that are either planned or underway.
Supporting enterprise digital transformation and leveraging technology to improve HR efficiency and effectiveness, for example, are the first and third most common HR improvement initiatives planned for 2019 with none being tackled by a majority of study participants.
“In order to close the capability gaps we’ve seen, and to truly step up the pace of digital transformation, HR organisations require a long-term plan of action that prioritises closing critical gaps while leveraging technology to its fullest,” said Harry Osle, global HR practice leader and principal in charge of the HR advisory practice, the Hackett Group.
“It must be a multi-pronged effort that incorporates technology implementation, data standards, process redesign, organisational restructuring, and more.”
Commenting on the research, Rialto Consultancy director Richard Chiumento pointed out that given we have lived in volatile and unpredictable business environments for at least a decade, there is no excuse for HR not cultivating a generation of executives who can lead in these difficult times.
“This must become a priority because organisations need leaders who are resilient, agile and can react to changing market and business demands,” he said.
“And when it comes to digital transformation, HR must understand it is about people and talent as much, if not more so, than technology and ensure they take a far more central role in such programmes.”
