“Companies born before the first internet bubble must realize they can no longer function as nontech businesses.” - Christopher Mims, The Wall Street Journal

What is Digital Dexterity?

Gartner defines Digital Dexterity as “the ability and desire to exploit existing and emerging technologies for better business outcomes.” It’s a simple enough concept: stay up to speed with the latest and greatest tech trends to leverage them toward increased efficiency in KPI achievement.

But there’s a catch: every time you add one of these new technologies, your business goals become closer within reach conceptually, but your technology stack grows in complexity. What many businesses are learning quickly is a sometimes discouraging but true fact:

Without an optimized integration strategy, your technologies will work against you rather than for you.

This isn’t a new issue; most businesses accept and make allowances for integration as a large piece of their technology budget and rely on the expertise of their partners and consultants to advise them on how to proceed with an integration strategy.

Unfortunately, consultants, whether manifesting as independent advisors or as agents inside third-party tech or service providers, represent obstacles for the dexterity-curious business unless they are extremely modern in their thinking.

Problem #1: Consultants represent bias toward known/legacy entities and ecosystems

Most consultants are born from experience with service or technology in a particular market. Their knowledge comes sharp but short-shafted: they know a little about a lot, and their focus will be working within the confines of what they know the most.  If, however, they lack expertise in digital dexterity, whatever point at which they begin is too far behind the starting line.  There are enough different types and brands of technology in every business vertical that the issue is not finding the right technology; it’s making them all work together.  The strengths and weaknesses of technologies themselves become less important when a proper strategy of deploying them can maximize their effectiveness and minimize or eliminate their weaknesses through creative technology overlapping.

Most consultants today do not approach the entire tech ecosystem as the problem to solve; rather, they work inside segments of it in which they feel most comfortable.  Changing technologies in and out of an environment with poor or no integration strategy is like changing your car’s engine every time you run out of gas: you have neither identified nor fixed the problem, you have just spent a lot of money on the engine your consultant liked or made the most money on. Which leads to the next issue:

Problem #2: Consultants make more money through complexity and confusion than through simplicity and efficiency.

An old sales manager of mine had an expression that always stuck with me: “A consultant is a person who takes your watch and charges you to tell you the time.”

Consultants arise from the perception that you cannot solve your own technology/business issues on your own, because you don’t understand them.  Businesses seek consultants when what they think they should be able to accomplish becomes impeded by issues beyond their expertise, and technology integration maps/process workflows on the road to digital dexterity are beyond the purview of most businesses.  With emerging technologies like iPaaS.com and other integration platforms, this problem has become 75% less complicated, but that obviates the need for all the extra consulting in building a technology strategy, which leads to a quandary for the consultant:

Digitally dexterous companies are far less reliant on consultants and service providers.

When from the very beginning of the strategy, business and technology can work together rather than against each other, the team can focus on replacing old and adding new technologies without the fear of massive disruption to the organization.  This kind of freedom to upgrade and explore is a new benefit of transformative, next-gen integration technologies that many consultants either have not or will not embrace because it’s not to their benefit to make themselves unnecessary.

Problem #3: Consultants who are not leading with Digital Dexterity are obsolete.

No matter what industry you are in, even if you are the undisputed leader, businesses and technologies are emerging constantly, which will make how you are doing business today archaic in a few years.  Since the tech boom, those cycles have shortened year-over-year, and now most technologies are replaced between two and five years.  Most businesses leverage a minimum of 10 crucial technologies they rely on daily, and if each one of them has a 2-5 year life cycle, at any given time, you will be evaluating two to five new technologies to upgrade or replace.

Without an internal strategy to manage this problem, your business will be reliant on one consultant or another at all times, and if they are not providing strategies for you to solve these problems on your own, you will never break the cycle of costly reliance on 3^rd parties for your success. An easy way to evaluate a consultant is whether the concept of digital dexterity exists in their strategy, because:

If digital dexterity is not in the first conversation, it won’t end up in the last.

The reality is that a modern approach to business strategy requires a technology-first approach, and digital dexterity cannot be shoehorned into the process after the other decisions are made.  It must be the first goal, with all other goals subservient, because it doesn’t matter what problems individual technologies are solving, because problems that poorly or unintegrated systems cause – inaccurate/lost data, bad customer experience/reviews, massive tech-spend, and lack of cohesion across your business departments – are a greater threat to your organization.

Conclusions

Modern consultants must approach any business problem as a technology problem first; nothing can scale without solving the problem of complex technology ecosystems. Replacing siloed technologies with favorite or well-known entities will solve one small problem while immediately creating a larger one. Solid consultants in the technology era should be creating a path enabling the client to no longer constantly rely on 3^rd-party entities to assist with what should be simple hot-swapping of and upgrades to existing ecosystems.  If they are not leading with digital dexterity in their engagement, they are actively limiting the growth of their clients.