Enterprise technology is creating a ripple effect across companies and entire countries. How can leaders everywhere harness this momentum? A new report is your roadmap.
Janet
Janet
works in administration at a small bank in Dublin, and her back-office job is beginning to feel like a dead-end.
Her paycheck hasn’t budged since she started two years ago, and there are discussions about automated bots that might one day eliminate paperwork-based jobs like hers. She senses that it’s high time to change her career trajectory. Encouraged by her supervisor, she enrolls in an online course and gains certifications in cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software.
The effect of this action is like dropping a pebble into a pool—the ramifications ripple outward in ways Janet could never have anticipated. Thanks to this new skill set, the company creates a new hybrid customer service-IT role for Janet. She takes the lead in migrating customer data to the cloud, an effort that will cut costs and provide a single platform to manage client relations. Janet then brings on a consultant who customises a web of apps to the firm’s unique needs, which in turn pushes business out to a host of cloud-based vendors and developers. Janet gets a raise and moves out of her cramped flat into a house in the suburbs in Ranelagh.
Ripples continue to radiate. The bank’s increase and centralisation of customer data and its ability to analyse it feeds the development of new, lead-generation strategies across sales and marketing and new digital skills needed to execute them. These initiatives grow revenue and generate more demand for IT-enhanced customer service roles like the one Janet pioneered. She’s promoted to manager.
The company’s path towards digitalisation encourages other bank employees, including tellers and security guards, to take online courses to upskill or reskill, with some joining online groups where they learn from fellow trainees around the world.
The amount of customer data the company possesses has now grown by leaps and bounds, creating a need for machine learning experts to set up data infrastructure and business analysts who can translate the data insights into competitive advantage.
In order to consolidate and direct these efforts, the bank realises it needs a CIO.
After a look around, it’s clear one person is right for the job: Janet.
Thanks to that first step to move her career forward, uncertain of where it would lead, she propelled herself from the back-office to the C-suite. Just as importantly, that desire to develop her career through reskilling put into motion knock-on effects that reverberated throughout the local economy, helping initiate a digital transformation from the bottom up.
The Concentric Circles Concentric Circles of corporate change
It’s a fictional story that illustrates a factual truth occurring all around us—the Ripple Effect.
In the natural world, it’s akin to a single tidal pool of plankton-rich seawater supporting interlinking circles of life from algae to otters, fueling biodiversity and resilience at every strata. In the Fourth Industrial Revolution’s version, a rising tide of digital fluency is leading to a flourishing interdependent network, where small actions of a single business, its employees, and its tech providers trigger chain reactions of exponential growth: new jobs, products, and services.
This phenomenon is what the authors of the new IDC whitepaper, Society Impact - A Study of the Salesforce Economy in the UK and Ireland , sponsored by Salesforce UK and Ireland, call a “competence shift”—the upskilling and reskilling into new roles created by big data and cloud technology that’s transforming today’s workforce and future-proofing company ranks.
In suburban office parks and urban start-up lofts...
paper documents and filing cabinets
are giving way to
cloud storage.
Gut instincts
are being complemented by
data-driven insights.
Artificial intelligence
is speeding the pace of
progress.
And the job you take in five years may rely on technology that hasn’t even been developed yet.
The Impending Country-Wide Metamorphosis Metamorphosis
Our own data shows that this shift is
already beginning to take place.
An October 2021 survey conducted by Quartz Creative polled UK-based business decision-makers on issues around reskilling and upskilling in the digital economy. 51% of respondents reported that they have had to learn new digital skills over the past year in order to progress in their own role or position. 34% said they've had to learn new digital skills within the past 90 days.
The beauty of this digital ecosystem is its capacity to harness and magnify the actions of even a single actor like our fictional friend Janet. However, in the UK and Ireland, the covid-19 pandemic has accelerated a widening gap between citizens with digital capabilities and those without. In tandem, 9 out of 10 jobs will have changed or been eliminated by 2030, according to the IDC Society Impact* forecast.
The good news is that 72% of UK workers want to upskill into online and data-related work in order to overcome that gap, finds a survey conducted this year by Mendix. Add to that, the IDC Society Impact* authors show that an innovation giant like Salesforce can make an impact on a mass scale. The cloud computing leader’s urgent need for a digitally competent workforce is set to pull whole swathes of the population into the future—real people who share Janet’s fictitious aspirations.
Take Kaelen Moss. He turned a data science degree into an internship at a Salesforce consultancy, but after rising through the firm’s ranks, he lost his job at the start of the covid-19 pandemic. The sudden news prompted him to shift from implementing Salesforce projects to leading marketing cloud training at Revolent, a global talent agency addressing the cloud skills gap head-on. In the course of this new role, he’s even been able to help his mum and sister become certified Marketing Cloud Administrators. “My mum has been able to quit her poorly paid 60-hours per week job in retail,” Moss says, “and start a new career that will give her more choice and less stress.”
Or meet Yvonne Nicol. After a decade-long career in hairdressing, Nicol joined the British energy giant Centrica as a customer services adviser, quickly ascending to manager where she was tasked with setting up a new call centre. The experience stoked her curiosity in technology and with Trailhead, Salesforce’s free digital skills training platform, she later delivered desktop and data centre cloud migrations, then became the service owner for Centrica’s Identity and Access Management system, and most recently took on the challenge of being a Salesforce DevOps Engineer. As Nicol puts it, “Digitalisation and the pandemic are both driving a lot of change. By continuing to learn new skills, I’ve been able to work in multiple roles and teams during my 23 years at Centrica.”
These are merely two examples of the metamorphosis fueled by digital upskilling. As discovered in the IDC and Salesforce Economic Impact Report**, the ripple effects ignited by Salesforce and its ecosystem of UK partners will create 271,700 new jobs and £52 billion in new business revenues between 2021 and 2026.
These new positions in Workforce 4.0 fields like CRM technology, cybersecurity, and omnichannel marketing will streamline old workflows, making companies more efficient and impactful. These new roles will then create more demand for information and the tools to process it, propelling the growth of the digital ecosystem and the cycle of innovation. The insights of the report point to three fields in particular—IT, sales, and HR—which will serve as bellwethers for these waves of change.
From Wales to Mayfair, Cork to Donegal, IT will go from the backseat to taking the driver’s wheel, fusing analytics and automation into the C-suite decision-making process. AI and centralised data management will turn sales into the beating heart of customer relationships. HR directors will no longer be institutional gatekeepers, but catalysts of professional development, turning talent metrics into opportunities for growth and upskilling.
Let’s take a closer look at the expanding digital ecosystems in these three fields.
The IT department was once cast in a supporting role, largely siloed from the rest of the company except when someone’s printer went on the fritz or an outmoded operating system needed to be updated.
In the future, almost all that routine work will be accomplished by cloud computing and automated processes, freeing up IT departments for more human-centered, high-level work. In fact, the abstract, oft-quoted concept of digital transformation is, in practice, the seeding of IT throughout an entire organisation, with problem-solving and decision-making in every team taking advantage of the latest technological tools. Accordingly, the decision-makers polled in the 2021 Quartz Creative survey cited the CIO as the most impactful C-suite position in driving digital change.
For example, instead of observing network visibility issues or addressing ad-hoc access policies, IT will be setting up Internet of Things sensor systems that will monitor data on air quality and energy usage and furnish spatial heat maps. These insights then help office planners build hybrid workplace blueprints, minimizing electricity costs and maximizing employee productivity and all-around enjoyment.
They’ll be horticulturists of growing digital ecosystems, helping to tailor cloud applications to the needs of each business function, migrating and merging data between individual software vendors, and strengthening defenses against cyberattacks.
The changes this integrated form of IT will bring about will create a pipeline of services and jobs. 67% of respondents in the Quartz Creative poll reported that tools like cloud computing, data analytics, and AI have already transformed their workflows either moderately or completely. Businesses will need to hire leaders who understand technological possibilities and possess the soft skills to shepherd progress smoothly.
Expect to see IT occupying more and higher seats at the table alongside decision-making, strategy-setting executives in the form of Chief Technology/Transformation/Information Officers. They’ll no longer operate in a reactive, fix-it mode, but actively lead the company by envisioning, engineering, and educating teams on digital solutions at scale.
of respondents in the Quartz Creative poll reported that tools like cloud computing, data analytics, and AI have already transformed their workflows either moderately or completely
is how those same respondents ranked the CIO in terms of C-suite position most likely to drive digital change
IT Tickets
Present and Future
The archetype of sales is as a kind of mercenary band of PowerPoint-wielding road warriors and desk-pounding cold-callers, a place where you lived and died by your Rolodex and revenue goals, and third prize is you’re fired.
Sales strategies were built solely around product features, and the unique ability of a lone wolf salesperson to close the deal with a winning personality and relentless energy.
Sales in a modern business climate requires a wholesale shift in training, attitude, tactics, and tools. The mantra now is customer-centric, not product-centric, and deeply collaborative. It requires an intimate knowledge of the client, using CRM platforms to corral and analyse customer interaction data from a centralised point of view. While the depth of a personal network and the deft human touch will still be two deciding factors in a client win, data and analysis can isolate the best leads before a sales professional even clocks in, cutting hours of lost time out the day.
Whereas in the past, the salesperson was commonly the main conduit between the customer and the organisation, customers now interact independently across multiple company channels, from downloadable whitepapers to social media feeds to free webinars. To track the digital footprint of the customer and make sense of it, the sales department needs the help of a host of other roles in data science, predictive analytics, and cloud architecture.
Taking sales data out of Excel sheets and putting it in a shared cloud platform gives sales managers targeted insights into upselling opportunities and restructuring territories. Even better, feeding that data to AI offers sellers a competitive advantage on how to optimise offers and pricing.
This will be the tradecraft of the next generation of salespeople: an expertise in digital tools that’s second nature alongside a deepening emotional intelligence that makes a long-term partnership, not just a quick sale.
The expected decline in demand for rote manual tasks over the next decade, according to McKinsey’s 2020 research
The anticipated 10-year increase in the need for emotional and social intelligence skills like entrepreneurship, reports McKinsey
Money Moves
Present and Future
All too often, HR has operated like a turnstile that employees walk through on their way in and on their way out.
Beyond that, it can be largely invisible or even an annoyance, where workers have to navigate red tape to negotiate work-from-home policies or hash out PTO.
It was a paradigm destined to change, and the pandemic accelerated that shift in sweeping fashion. Now HR leads are urgently investing in new roles that would never have been associated within a department not known as a bastion of innovation. The numbers in our polling back that idea up too. Nearly 70% of respondents said that the pandemic sped the adoption of digital tools in their company, either moderately or by a great deal.
To grow with the times, companies will need HR representatives who can skillfully employ data science to center the employee experience (EX), streamline and unify workflows, and attract top talent.
Just imagine: Data analytics and cloud computing can now give HR leaders the tools to surmount disruptive challenges like the pandemic. By upskilling their own ranks to improve HR workflows, they’re helping build a culture of work that incorporates the power of the latest and greatest tech.
AI-powered bots can take work off human desks by tapping into databases and content libraries in order to answer frequently asked employee questions or escalate issues that can’t be handled at lower levels. Online platforms, like Salesforce’s Trailhead for Companies, can help employees track the progression of their skills and accomplishments—information which can generate recommendations on how to develop further and determine new professional goals. HR professionals can use the same data to see opportunities to move them to new roles.
Another product of the pandemic was a growing awareness of burnout in company ranks, a fact that had a direct effect on business continuity as workers began quitting in record numbers. Nearly 38% of workers in the UK are looking to change roles in the next six months or year, according to the HR tech firm Personio. For those searching for a new route, the Society Impact* report has encouraging news: current demand for workers with digital proficiency is at 42%, measured by job postings.
Surveys and bots can provide wellness checks for workers to signal that they’re feeling overworked or overstressed—data that in anonymised and aggregated form can guide managers’ decisions to provide mental health resources or institute new measures like additional company holidays, meeting-free days, or in-office meditation rooms.
HR departments will be engines of digital transformation, driving reskilling and upskilling efforts that will change organisations and EX from within.
of Quartz Creative survey respondents said that the pandemic sped the adoption of digital tools either moderately or by a great deal
Current demand for workers with digital proficiency, reports the IDC Society Impact* report