Although nearly all large enterprises are pursuing improvement initiatives, digitizing the business is less about disruption and more about meeting focused objectives, according to a new report from Infosys Knowledge Institute, the research arm of consulting firm Infosys.
IKI conducted an online survey of more than 1,000 C-level and other senior executives from the U.S., Australia, China, France, Germany, India and the U.K. in July 2019, which showed that the focused objectives include better understanding of customers and markets (cited 46 percent of respondents), customer experience (45 percent), increasing productivity (40 percent), and employee experience (35 percent).
Digital initiatives require people with sophisticated technical skills and the ability to continually update those skills as cycles continue to shorten, the report said. The five technical skills in greatest demand today are analytics (67 percent), user experience (67 percent), automation (61 percent), IT architecture (59 percent) and artificial intelligence (58 percent).
Digital projects are focused on creating superior customer and employee experiences, and soft skills have become as important as technical ones. The soft skills in greatest demand are teamwork (74 percent), leadership (70 percent) and communication (68 percent).
The study said respondents seem to underestimate the relative importance of two soft skills: empathy (52 percent), which it said is essential for design thinking; and learnability (56 percent), which is key to the continuous personal and technical development essential for today’s digital talent.
