Written in the wake of the business challenges brought about by the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic, among other issues, the eBook examines the question "What skills will your workforce need to ensure your organisation continues to thrive?"

The publication advocates the value of an approach that

• identifies the issues
• supports the change
• determines your goals
• sets up projects, and
• defines the outcome.

Wendy Edie, eCom Scotland's Managing Director, explained, "Digital transformation is now a major issue on today's C-Suite agenda. To be successful, organisations must engage their staff, improve their digital skills, and develop effective digital processes that work for the organisation."

Yet eCom's research, along with independent studies, show that success involves not only adding new technology, but also changing culture and upskilling people. This has resulted in reviews of such processes as recruitment, personnel induction, and learning and development.

eCom recommends establishing a digital transformation ideas team, with members drawn from across the organisation, to identify the issues and foster an innovation culture.

Next comes mapping the current customer journey, identifying the ideal journey, focusing on team-based tools that encourage collaboration, as well as supporting the necessary change. Wendy explained, "A key goal of using digital solutions is getting teams to work better - and generate evidence of compliance and competency as they carry out their work. This evidence helps you map the benefits of moving to a digital solution."

Setting goals revolves around such things as identifying customer needs and business opportunities; designing innovative solutions for services, products, and processes; improving the efficiency of the customer training process; and reducing time to compliance and competency.

"Next, try out new ideas and test potential solutions via projects," advised Wendy. "A small team works best. Set up an online instant chat communication channel to encourage them to share their activities and ideas."

The emerging digitally transformed organisation is one in which

• workers collaborate through apps and dashboards, arranging meetings using any device, anywhere
• teams manage tasks and workflow using online systems, automatically reporting performance and compliance
• production is optimised with secure and safe automation that’s controlled by knowledge workers
• people can be instantly moved into new jobs with full competency, training-record tracking, and appraisal history
• all system data is held centrally for analysis with data-mining tools
• collaboration fosters a culture of innovation
• learning is at the centre of everything

Wendy commented, "The five steps in this eBook will help readers to build their own action plan. Nonetheless, we've found that organisations uncover many potential improvements, so it can be difficult to select the ones that will build the organisation's capabilities and bring measurable improvements. That's where an external expert can support the process, helping select and prioritise the insights to investigate.