Head of Digital.
Or any other senior C-Suite role which has the word ‘digital’ in it.
There is no digital, only strategy. Having a Chief Digital person is a bit like having Chief of Industrial, or a Head of Electricity. Which clearly sound ridiculous. These are not departments, but an integral part of the infrastructure.
If a company has a head of digital means they still don’t get it after 20 years. It also it tells me these two important things:
- They are still thinking in verticals, instead of the emerging horizontal ‘metastructure‘. They think digital is a thing off to the side, instead a new layer in industry which effects everything & everyone.
- They don’t believe it is something that every person in every division should understand, and that they can continue to do what they’ve always done and add this new inconvenient bit to it.
It’s this thinking that will send them broke, force disruption upon them. They are not seeing what is really happening and are taking a defensive position, instead of an all encompassing revolutionary one. And believe me, this is a revolution for the ages.
Simple advice from Startup blog is this: If you want your company to survive the impending disruption, then make sure no single person in your entire organisation has the word digital in their title.