Digital Transformation in Business Organizations

Although the impact of digitization is not new, the digital economy is entering a new age that presents unprecedented challenges for every CEO.

Digital tools and Digital Systems are invading the business environment,  changing  the way we work, communicate, and sell. This has opened  new opportunities and challenges.
Digitization has to extend the reach of organizations, improve management decisions, and speed the development of new products and services. At the same time, the excessively rapid adoption of technologies can disrupt traditional business models. Organizations need to carefully tread the path towards digital transformation with a concrete strategy to harness its strengths and mitigate its challenges.

Today I would like to talk about the right approach to help companies in understanding how to manage and to surf the Digital Wave and the related opportunities.
Many companies are hiring a new role, CDOs,  thinking that could be the solution, and maybe it is.
For starters, CDOs are hot property. Salaries for a Chief Digital Officer range from $73,000 to $180,000, with the median falling at $ 100,000  .
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That means CDOs can be paid more than CMOs where top earnings are around $160k 

​Secondly, in my opinion there are two different kind of CDO:

1. Evangelist Chief Digital Officer
2. Operation Chief Digital Officer

His or her main role is to be an evangelist for digital across the business and across different departments.
He is in charge to educate and inform on all things digital. 
In this case I'm talking about a role with no P&L and little management responsibilities. 
The second type I call ‘Operation CDO’.
He has real power and the job to  transform the entire business on their journey to becoming CEO.  
Some of his keywords:

• leadership
• vision
• customer-centricity
• change
• transformation
• innovation
• disruption
• tech
• data
• culture
• agile
• collaboration
• communication
• building buy-in. 

The role of a operation CDO is typically broader than a CMO. The CDO has a more complete view of the customer experience across touchpoints beyond just marketing to include sales and service. The CDO often controls product as well as marketing.
In a perfect organisation for the operation CDO it will be very hard to co-exist happily for long with a CMO.  The perfect scenario would be to have aHead of Marketing who reports to the CDO.
CDO is not just ‘vertical’ down through the organisation, but ‘horizontal’. Digital will permeate every single area of the business, across technology, data, culture, people, process, strategy. Digital will need to become over time part of the DNA of the business. 
ConclusionsChief Digital Officer is a very interesting role that marketers can take up.
So if marketers do not step up they may find their new boss is a ‘digital’executive, one whose main agenda is not only digital but customer-centricity and business transformation using Digital skills.