I am trying to understand what are the key skills on the ground that would be pivotal for moving our company to a digital first organization? Have you trialed anything in your organization? What are the skills and trainings you recommend that would be beneficial for the CDIO function at a high level to at least be prepared for the digital disruption in the next two years?

Digital Transformation journey is unique for every organization based on the organization current eco system, skills, level of maturity and adaptability appetite and much more along with organizational business goals and affordability. There is laundry list of things to be taken care before come up with the roadmap for digital first organization. We have done our analysis to understand our strengths and gaps along aligning to the organizational goals, prepared a 5 years NorthStar roadmap with clear milestones of meaningful and measurable KPI’s aligning to OKRs.

Excellent long answers already so here’s a short one- try to select team members with diverse backgrounds and experience with many different technologies who like to continually learn. Who was the first one who brought up AI to you? Who brought up using Cloud to you? The team can’t only have this type of people but you need some who are out there experimenting

Without knowing more about the organization's structure, technology stack, or people's skill levels, it's difficult to provide a focused solution, and any recommendations may end up being too generic. However, aside from the technology aspect, one critical area that needs attention is the organizational culture and mindset. Here are a few suggestions:

1. Align employee goals. In larger organizations, these goals may be well-documented but often get lost in the process of cascading down, leading to misalignment across teams and higher management.
2. Encourage feedback from those on the ground—the doers and contributors. Their insights should be consolidated, as there’s often a disconnect between proposals and the realities on the ground. One size doesn’t fit all, and some of the latest technologies may not integrate well with older systems. Sometimes, people simply go through the motions to check a box, without delivering real benefits.
3. If your business is customer-focused, prioritize addressing customer pain points and streamline data. This will provide valuable insights and improve decision-making.
4. Simplify processes to enable faster rollouts. If the first and second reviews aren’t effective, don’t add more layers of reviews—change the reviewers instead.

My answer will focus on soft skills, since these ones for me are the foundation of a successful digital transformation in my experience doing so:

Tolerance to frustration ( There will be many expectations about the project, some people will be excited about it, some will be negative and others will be intrigued. There could be people who at the least insignificance thing will switch sides. Keeping morale high is essential. Since I don’t know the size of your company it could be impossible to talk to all the company, but convey the message to leaders spread out to the whole organization to maintain higher morale and the same project’s vision. Be proactive not reactive ).
Communication ( Essential to all people involved. Choose wisely which tools to be used, frequency of communications, the tone you have to use ( Aiming for call2action ) and the sense of urgency when it’s needed ).
Change management ( There will be bosses/leaders who don’t have the “guts” to change those team members who are stalling or blocking the project. Be prepared to remove those in leadership positions or fire them if necessary )

 Not knowing the current state of your organization, it is difficult to say definitively what skills and training are required for the CDIO function. However, based on my experience of working on multiple digital transformation programs here are a few areas that you may want to hone in

1. Leadership and Vision:
 Build alignment at the C-level about what digital first means for the organization. Be clear about the expected outcome of the digital-first. For example, are you going national vs staying regional? What is your retail vs online delivery model etc?

 2. Digital Leadership skills:
 Once you are clear on the expectations, then identify capabilities that need to be built across the company. Which then leads to identifying technical capabilities required to support business capabilities. For example, moving to public cloud, or agile/scrum. Tools such as LeanIX may help

 3. Change Management skill:
 This is the hardest part - bringing everyone along the journey. Some people may lose something, but it's an opportunity to gain new skills. For example, training employees to work in an agile way

 4. Technical Proficiency skills:
  ○ Cloud Computing
  ○ DevSecOps
  ○ CyberSecurity
  ○ Data Analytics
  ○ Microservice, Event Driven Architecture, Serverless
  ○ AI/ML - identifying use cases to support the business capabilities

 5. Customer-centric approach skills
  ○ Customer Journey Mapping
  ○ Design Thinking
  ○ UX Design
  ○ Creating Customer Focus Groups and building a feedback loop
  ○ Digital Marketing

 6. Product Management and Agile practice skill
  ○ Agile methodologies - Depending on the size of your company it could be a combination of scrum, kanban, SaFe, etc. Building skill sets to support these methodologies such as Agile coach, Scrum Masters

 7. Innovation
  ○ Hackathons to foster collaboration
  ○ Brainstorming sessions

 8. Collaboration and Communication skills and tools
  ○ Digital Collaboration tools such as Slack, MS Teams, Confluence, Sharepoint, Monday.com
  ○ Communication - Keeping the organization informed about the change, and listening to the voice of the employee.