The potential of digital for companies is still not fully exploited yet. Enterprises, especially SMEs find it difficult to build digital capabilities to take advantage of the potential of these technologies. The gap between supply and demand of both ICT professionals as well as e-Leaders emphasises the challenge business leaders face to staff for digital transformation. The interim report on ‘Digital Organisational Frameworks and IT Professionalism’ describes how digital transformation of enterprises is enabled by IT competences and professionalism at individual level and digital organisational capabilities at enterprise level. It offers a coordinated approach for the effective adoption of digital organisational frameworks and IT professionalism to help them take advantage of the opportunities offered by digital technologies.
Improving organisational capability requires improving individual IT competences, skills and knowledge. IT organisations must accelerate the time to value of innovation all while optimising spending on IT. Upgrading skills and certifying staff will deliver the most persistent performance improvement in IT operations. Digital transformation is enabled by IT competences and professionalism at individual level and digital organisational capabilities at enterprise level. They are mutually reinforcing. IT organisational and management frameworks add value, as they provide the competences, knowledge and skills related to a certain area of expertise. Our work provides a better understanding of how the competences of individuals can be developed in tandem with the collective organisational capabilities of enterprises, to achieve digital capability excellence.
The Digital Capability Reference Framework for enterprises supports them in their digital transformation journey. It will provide the instrument for companies to understand which competences are relevant for developing a certain capability; who in the organisation is carrying out a role associated with those competences, and if that person involved is matching the requirements for that role. Based on the assessment of the latter, decisions can be taken as regards upskilling, recruiting or outsourcing: and hence contributing to the success of the company. It will provide insights into understanding the organisation’s digital maturity, for deciding where to excel and invest in, for identifying good or new practices, and/or to understand which skill gaps need to be filled. The Digital Capability Reference Framework for enterprises maps digital capabilities to individual roles and competences: based on the European standard e-Competence Framework. It will consist of an overview of digital capabilities building on core IT processes, mapped to IT professional competences in the e-Competence Framework, and consequently to Professional IT role profiles, and further to Related IT organisational and management frameworks. It takes into account new ways of working, that are changing for instance the software engineering culture. The European e-Competence Framework has proven in practice to be a great instrument in both traditional and new ways of working.
The report can be downloaded here.
The report has been written as part of the service contract “Digital Organisational Frameworks and IT Professionalism” – EASME/COSME/2016/016. This service contract is carried out by Capgemini Consulting, Empirica, and IDC.