Podcast: Is your organization digitally mature?
So your company likes to play around with the latest digital toys ... but does that make it a digital organization?
No. Not even close – in the same way that your use of social media doesn’t necessarily make you a social organization. It’s a cultural thing. It’s about leadership. It’s about this stuff being baked into your DNA. You can’t just bolt “digital” onto an outdated business model, write a policy statement, and call it good.
Our guest this week, Anh Phillips, knows that better than most. Anh is a researcher and author at Deloitte’s Center for Integrated Research, where she works to understand the impact that emerging digital technologies have on an organization’s leadership, talent, and culture.
In this episode, Anh breaks down Deloitte’s new report “Coming of Age Digitally: Learning, Leadership, and Legacy,” and explains what it says about the state of our workforce and our organizations when it comes to being future-ready and digitally mature.
In this conversation, we cover:
- What is digital maturity?
- Where are our organizations right now?
- What do digitally mature businesses do that others don’t?
- How can the rest of us get started down this path?
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How digitally mature is your organization? “Coming of Age Digitally: Learning, Leadership, and Legacy” is an annual report created by Deloitte’s Center for Integrated Research and the MIT Sloan Management Review to gauge how “digitally mature” today’s organizations are.
The 2018 report says, "When we asked more than 3,300 respondents to describe what’s different about working in a digital environment compared with a traditional one, three differences accounted for nearly 60 percent of all replies: the pace of change; a flexible, distributed workplace; and culture."
They go on to note that "none of these differences are technical in nature. They instead point to the way digitization is changing the very nature of work — which in turn can require new ways of leading.”
Much like being a future-proof accounting and finance professional isn’t necessarily a matter of learning all of the new technology that will facilitate a greater advisory role, becoming a digital organization has relatively little to do with digitizing. It’s about how they’re fundamentally changing what they do and how they do it.
So what can executives do in light of these findings? The study reveals three critical actions leaders can take to help employees excel: “Providing direction, enabling innovation, and facilitating execution."
Election cybersecurity: How secure is it? On a lighter (or darker) note: Something interesting happened at a recent three-day "Def Con" security convention.
The event was designed to test the strength of the United States’ election infrastructure and find out just how secure our voting systems are. The idea is to then pass on any vulnerabilities that they find to individual states so they can improve their systems.
Well, it took an 11-year-old boy about 10 minutes to hack into a replica of the website that hosts Florida’s election results, as reported by NBC News, and he was just one of 35 kids ages 6 to 17 to do so. Once the young hackers got in there, they were able to change names and vote totals – and all of this less than 3 months before our midterm elections.
The National Association of Secretaries of State, which is responsible for counting votes, said it welcomed the findings from the convention, adding, “It would be extremely difficult to replicate these systems since many states utilize unique networks and custom-built databases with new and updated security protocols."
So 11-year-olds might not be able to do it. Word’s still out on Russian hackers, I guess. We’ll have to wait and see. More on that in November.
Here’s my favorite part of this story. These pre-teen hackers added as many as 12 billion votes to some candidates tallies and changed some of the candidates’ names to “Bob Da Builder” and “Richard Nixon’s head.”
Give the kids an A for creativity. Our security systems … not so much. We’ll have to give them an incomplete for now.
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