Digital Enabled Structures: Impact of Digital Transformation

Impact of Digital Transformation on the Implementation of Digital Enabled Structures to Support Digital Competence of Employees – Abstract




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Introduction
Digital transformation has accelerated changes in business or organizational processes against a worryingly slow development of digital skills. According to the Global Knowledge IT Skills and Salary Report CITATION GK21 \l 2057 (GK, 2021), 77% of decision-makers in IT in the EMEA region lament lack of skills in key areas like cloud computing, cybersecurity, DevOps, and systems architecture among other specialized segments. Focusing on Europe alone, a recent McKinsey & Company CITATION McK201 \n \t \l 2057 (2020) report indicated that the European public lacks an estimated 8.6 million people with digital skills. At the same time, digital transformation has been instrumental in the implementation of digital enabled spaces to support the digital competence of employees. Thus, digital transformation has a two-faceted relationship with the development of these structures.
Research Significance
Success in an increasingly digital world depends on how well people can handle digital technologies. Companies that want to benefit from the current and emerging digital technologies need employees with digital skills. Further, companies seeking to sell digital technologies can only have a market if their customer’s employees have digital skills. Some organizations like Amazon and SAP have seen the importance of having customers who have digital skills and have expanded training opportunities to this effect. By 2025, Amazon plans to have helped 29 million people globally in growing their tech kills through free cloud computing skills training CITATION Ter20 \l 2057 (Carlson, 2020). Thus, while digital transformation is expanding the need for improved and new skills, causing a gap across industries, it is also shaping the structures through which employees can improve their digital competencies.
Different researchers have also observed this relationship. For instance, Marandini et al CITATION Mor203 \n \t \l 2057 (2020) argued that digitization presents opportunities for growth and improvement in working conditions while at the same time, it brings noble challenges like skill requirements. This can potentially lead to distributional implications such as those reported by organizations like Global Knowledge CITATION GK21 \n \t \l 2057 (2021) and McKinsey & Company CITATION McK201 \n \t \l 2057 (2020). Further, arguing that ‘yesterday’s skills are not enough to survive today’s needs”, Kraus et al CITATION Kra211 \n \t \l 2057 (2021) concluded that the shortage in digital skills will soon develop into organizational crises as powerful companies scramble for rare abilities and step-up efforts to keep employees updated, skills-wise.
At the same time, some scholars argue that the impact of digital transformation in expanding avenues through which the public and employees can improve their digital skills...