Understanding the

People Side of Digital

Business: An Empirical
Analysis of Digital
Dexterity

Overview
Ninety percent of corporate leaders view digital business initiatives as a top priority,
yet 83% struggle to make meaningful progress. Digital business transformation — the
use of the latest digital technologies and practices to create new digital business
models — is an enterprise challenge, not just an IT challenge. At its core is the need
to change how employees work to enable greater enterprise agility.

These are the findings of our unique survey spanning almost 3,500 employees from
various functions and industries on digital dexterity — the combination of beliefs,
mindset and behaviors that accelerates digital business transformation. Our research
interviews with hundreds of CIOs and other IT leaders show that progressive CIOs are
actively participating in measures to build a digitally dexterous workforce.

Key Findings

■ Talent changes lie at the heart of digital business transformation. Digital business
requires a shared ambition and vision for how information and digital technology
can transform the way the company does business. It also requires new ways of
working to execute that vision. While few debate the importance of technology
talent in the digital business, the role of employees’ beliefs, mindsets and behaviors
in building and running a digital business is often underappreciated.
■ Digital dexterity drives digital business outcomes. Our quantitative analysis
shows that a specific set of beliefs, mindsets and behaviors — which we call digital

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 dexterity — accelerates digital business transformation. Digital dexterity includes
employees’ ambition and ability to build digital businesses and their ambition and
ability to work digitally. Employees with high levels of digital dexterity are 3.3 times
more likely to delivery digital business outcomes than those with moderate digital
dexterity.
■ Digital dexterity is in short supply. Only 9% of employees throughout the
enterprise have high digital dexterity, with limited variation across functions and
seniority levels.
■ Technology-savvy individuals aren’t necessarily digitally dexterous. Digital
dexterity requires the ability and ambition to work digitally and build a digital
business. This requires behaviors such as collaboration, flexibility and iterative
working as well as an outward-oriented perspective to appreciate how digital
technology affects market and competitive dynamics.
■ CIOs can strongly influence digital dexterity drivers. Building digital dexterity is
a shared C-suite responsibility, but CIOs play a significant role. CIOs can educate
the rest of the company’s leadership on how to drive digital dexterity and embrace
their role in developing it.

Talent: A Stumbling Block to Digital Business

Transformation
CEO and C-suite attention to digital business has reached an all-time high. Ninety
percent of corporate leaders view digital business initiatives as a top priority for
their organization, and almost 60% of CEOs globally expect their companies to
undergo a business model transformation in the next few years. Yet, despite significant
investments in new digital technologies, most organizations are seeing limited returns,
with 83% of corporate leaders struggling to make meaningful progress on digital
business transformation.

One reason incumbent organizations struggle to make meaningful progress on digital

business transformation is that they underestimate the extent of the people change
required. Successful digital business transformations require:

■ A shared ambition and vision for what digital technologies mean to the company
■ New and more iterative ways of working to execute that vision
■ The ability to cope with ambiguity and interdependencies while doing so
■ Changes to risk appetites, metrics and incentives

These and other enterprise changes are all underpinned by talent (see Figure 1).
Incumbent organizations that have successfully scaled digital businesses distinguish
themselves by their effectiveness at nurturing behaviors, mindsets and beliefs in their
talent that are typically associated with highly innovative companies. In short, these
incumbents are better at managing the business during periods of great uncertainty.

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Figure 1: Digital Business Transformation — Behavior and Talent-Related Challenges

CIOs Must Help Cultivate Digital Dexterity

Digital business transformation requires people change throughout the enterprise, not
just in IT. All employees and leaders need to change how they work and think about
their work to accelerate their organizations’ digital business plans. There is no shortage
of advice on what the correct beliefs, mindsets and behaviors are, but much of this
advice is too technology-centric, lacks practical guidance or is focused on narrow
groups within the enterprise.

To bring clarity, we surveyed almost 3,500 corporate employees globally — from

all industries, functions and seniority levels — to identify the beliefs, mindsets
and behaviors that impact digital business outcomes. We defined digital business
outcomes as the speed at which an organization can launch and complete digital
business initiatives and capture value from them relative to peers and competitors.

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We found that a specific set of beliefs, mindsets and behaviors, which we call digital
dexterity, drives these digital business outcomes (see Figure 2). Digital dexterity
includes the ambition and ability to build digital businesses and the ambition and
ability to work digitally.

Figure 2: The Profile of Digital Dexterity

The ambition to work digitally is reflected in employees’ belief that technology

can augment personal tasks and activities, their willingness to take on new roles to
support the company’s digital business plans, and their view that data and technology
proficiency is critical to career development. Working iteratively and with unclear
requirements — from anywhere with the right technologies — shows ability to work
digitally.

Similarly, the ambition to build a digital business includes employees’ understanding

of the criticality of digital business and their willingness to innovate and take
risks in pursuit of it. Working across seniority levels to help define the company’s
digital business direction and identify digital business opportunities and technologies
contributes to their ability to build digital businesses.

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In other words, digital dexterity is not just about working digitally or using digital
technologies. For digital business transformation to succeed, employees must have
the ambition and ability to collectively build digital businesses.

Key Findings From the Survey Data on Digital Dexterity

Our research offers a warning to CIOs and other executive leaders: at this moment,
there’s a good chance companies will fall behind in capturing the benefits of digital
technologies because of a digital dexterity deficit. Here are the key findings from our
analysis:

■ Digital dexterity matters but is in short supply. Employees with high digital
dexterity are three times more effective at improving digital business outcomes
than employees with low digital dexterity. However, only 9% of employees
throughout the enterprise have high digital dexterity. Digital dexterity varies
modestly across functions. The share of employees with high digital dexterity is
10% for corporate center staff (e.g., finance, HR, procurement) and 16% for leaders
throughout the enterprise. Even the most technologically sophisticated teams
(i.e., IT departments, data science and analytics groups) have a significant digital
dexterity deficit, with only 18% of their staff exhibiting high digital dexterity.
■ All components of digital dexterity matter (especially ambition). The four
components of digital dexterity defined above are closely related. To get the
full benefits, employees must be strong in all four (see Figure 3). At the same
time, our research shows that employees’ ambition to build digital businesses and
ambition to work digitally have a higher impact on digital business outcomes than
their ability to do so. Digital ambition — an understanding of the criticality of
digital technology to company performance and long-term viability — is likely to
stimulate employees’ openness to innovation and risk and their willingness to learn
new skills in the companies’ transformation journey.

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Figure 3: Likelihood of Accelerating Digital Business Transformation

■ Technology-savvy individuals aren’t necessarily digitally dexterous. Digital

dexterity requires the ability and ambition to work digitally and build digital
businesses. This requires behaviors such as collaboration, flexibility and iterative
working, not just a sound knowledge of technology.
■ Millennials don’t hold the key to digital dexterity. The belief that millennials
(employees born between 1981 and 1996) are “digital natives” and therefore have
higher levels of digital dexterity than older generations is a myth. Our data shows
no statistically significant correlation between age and digital dexterity (see Figure
4). This finding underscores that digital dexterity is about more than working
digitally; it also involves the ambition and ability to build digital businesses. This is
not to say that hiring younger employees is not beneficial, as they can bring new
perspectives and openness to learning, but hiring millennials by itself will not fix
the digital dexterity deficit.

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Figure 4: Prevalence of High Digital Dexterity Across Generations

■ Some of the usual suspects matter. Some personal and organizational factors
do impact digital dexterity. Employees who work in digitally intensive functions
(e.g., corporate IT, data and analytics or business intelligence) or in a digitally
intensive industry (e.g., technology, telecommunications) are slightly more likely
to have high digital dexterity. Similarly, seniority in the organizational hierarchy
and technical degrees (i.e., STEM, business or economics, or an M.B.A.) also
increase the likelihood of high digital dexterity. Having more tenure and working
in less digitally mature functions (e.g., operations) or in digitally nascent industries
(e.g., government, food and beverages) are factors that decrease digital dexterity.
However, the impact of these demographic factors on digital dexterity is modest
at best and vastly outweighed by a range of other factors that are more actionable
by senior leaders and that form the bulk of our analysis.

Implications
The growing impact of digital technologies in the enterprise today enables CIOs to
expand their careers and make a greater contribution to business value. This requires
them to rethink and broaden the scope and remit of their roles and collaborate
with other executive leaders to steward the enterprise through digital business
transformation. Building a digitally dexterous workforce lies at the heart of this
challenge.

Our empirical analysis looked at what digital dexterity is and is not. We also assessed
more than 200 factors across a range of categories (such as company culture,

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leadership behaviors, team structures, digital workplace, talent management practices
and proximity to digital innovators) to understand the actions CIOs and other business
leaders can take to increase digital dexterity.

Our analysis found three areas CIOs can focus on to help their organizations overcome
the digital dexterity deficit (see Figure 5):

1. Enabling enterprise agility (environmental drivers) — Break down divisions

between traditional IT and non-IT teams, flex IT’s engagement approach to match
business partners’ digital dexterity, and build enterprise-wide support for agile
ways of working.

2. Developing a specific set of employee competencies (talent-related drivers) —

The most relevant competencies include business acumen, adaptability, political
savvy, fusion collaboration and systems thinking.

3. Making digital dexterity a C-suite priority (leadership drivers) — Craft

compelling digital business narratives, model digitally dexterous leadership
behaviors, and embed digital dexterity into operational workflows, incentives,
budgets and policies.

Figure 5: Areas With the Greatest Impact on Digital Dexterity

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Create an Environment That Enables Enterprise Agility
Every company today is experiencing shifts that will radically change the role of the IT
department and the CIO. Cloud and IT automation are transforming the core IT tasks
of developing software and managing operations. Digital technologies and no-code
or low-code platforms enable business technologists and data scientists to do tasks
that used to be reserved for IT. And as new digital technologies expand the range of
technology-enabled business capabilities, technology expertise can no longer reside
in one function. The cross-cutting nature of digital business transformation similarly
erodes traditional boundaries across roles, functions and industries.

Thanks to these emerging and converging trends, IT’s role is shifting from end-to-
end delivery toward helping business partners extract full value from technology,
regardless of where the ideas or money come from. At the heart of IT’s new mandate
lies a focus on developing enterprise digital dexterity. This will require establishing
a new IT-business collaboration model — one that includes consulting on digital
business transformation (both strategic and technical), brokering connections with
digital experts and enabling self-service so business technologists have autonomy and
guardrails to safely experiment — as well as supporting agile ways of working (see
Figure 6).

Figure 6: Key Engagement Activities That Drive Digital Dexterity

Our analysis shows digital dexterity is higher when employees have the autonomy
to safely experiment with digital technologies and can easily access architectural,
security, integration and vendor management expertise where and when they need it.

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Therefore, to strengthen digital dexterity, CIOs and other IT leaders should help create
an environment that encourages and supports employees as they engage in tasks and
activities related to digital business transformation.

New IT-Business Collaboration Models for Digital Business

Consulting with leaders and employees on digital business transformation to give

them strategic and technical advice (for example, on architecture, integration and
security) and brokering connections with experts who can help them execute their
part in building digital businesses significantly increases employees’ digital dexterity.
Unfortunately, IT departments at only 32% and 22% of organizations, respectively, do
this consistently.

One of the critical obstacles is cultural. Staff at many corporate IT departments,

particularly at the nonexecutive levels, feel threatened when business areas or
corporate functions take a more active role in stewarding technology initiatives; they
think it portends their own organizations’ redundancy. But after analyzing hundreds of
companies’ experiences, we believe ownership of IT initiatives by corporate functions
and business areas is desirable. Far from threatening corporate IT’s existence, it places
greater demand on certain kinds of advice and support, albeit of the less traditional
sort.

CIOs and other IT leaders must address these fears and help their teams flex their
engagement approach to provide business partners with seamless access to strategic,
technical and other types of expertise based on their context and needs. This will
entail considerable culture change because it requires a significant departure from
IT departments’ traditional focus on process standardization and enterprisewide
solutions, which often lead to one-size-fits-all approaches.

Support of digital business initiatives requires IT departments to shift between

educating business partners on emerging technologies and new digitization
opportunities, coaching business partners on iterative development methodologies
and helping business partners understand integration requirements. It also means
giving them the autonomy to experiment with digital technologies as they work on
digital business initiatives.

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Case in Point

The CIO at Schlumberger is actively working to support — rather than take over —
IT and digital initiatives led by business areas. He works to promote greater business
autonomy over IT initiatives, revamp the IT-business engagement model and adapt
IT governance and support based on business partners’ digital dexterity.

Recognizing that different constituencies need different levels of help to develop

digital dexterity, IT at Schlumberger identifies the most appropriate engagement
posture. For example, business partners with medium or low digital dexterity are
encouraged to engage IT as an internal consultant for ideation, integration and
hands-on development support.

As business partners grow their digital dexterity, those who have demonstrated
the ability to manage technology responsibly (for instance, by demonstrating an
understanding of good security or architecture principles) are given a “digital
playbook” with guidelines and best practices for successfully executing digital
business transformation initiatives on their own. The digital playbook also grants
access to IT’s own toolset through a self-service portal that provides crowdsourced
tools and templates from the technical community (including tools to manage
projects and backlog) and identifies sources of expertise within IT to allow business
partners to easily access support. Additionally, the portal promotes peer-to-peer
interactions to drive engagement by allowing users to propose and vote on new
functionality.

The advance of digital transformation blurs traditional industry, functional and role
boundaries as organizations experiment with new business models. In response,
leading CIOs must redesign their IT operating model to allow IT and other business
employees to collaborate more closely, particularly in areas where digital business
initiatives are most prevalent.

For example, the IT team at a consumer goods company, Guayama[1], worked with
local business units in marketing and sales to jointly staff multidisciplinary product
lines they call “digital lighthouses” (see Figure 7). These product teams include all the
IT and non-IT people, data and technologies required to enable a business outcome,
and they are supported by embedded enterprise architects who act as product
strategy and technology advisors to the business product owners. Additionally,
the product teams are supported by standing delivery teams that have end-to-
end accountability for the business outcomes they support. Guayama’s approach of
embedding IT staff in multidisciplinary delivery teams helps them develop domain
expertise in specific business capabilities and assist business partners in developing
digital dexterity through consulting, brokering and coaching.

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Figure 7: Guayama’s Digital Lighthouses

Support Agile Ways of Working

Removing barriers to agile ways of working also increases the likelihood employees
will have high digital dexterity. This is particularly pronounced in corporate functions,
as overreliance on rigid requirements and processes in, for instance, finance, HR,
procurement or legal can slow digital business transformation or halt valuable
initiatives. As a result, employees in corporate functions face growing expectations to
support digital business transformation by adapting to new ways of working.

CIOs must work with leaders in other corporate functions to change behaviors
that slow digital business transformation. This involves helping corporate center
employees understand their relationships with IT and other digital business
stakeholders as one of co-enablers, rather than controllers, of the digital business (see
Table 1).

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Table 1: Changes Needed in the Corporate Center to Enable
Digital Business Transformation
Function From Controllers of IT
Finance Perfect Plans
Requiring IT to create
perfect plans discourages
value discovery.
Procurement Rigid Sourcing Policies
Vendor selection criteria
make it hard to work
with small or innovative
vendors.
Legal Legacy Risk Profiles
Legal risk profiles prevent
IT from rapidly enabling
new capabilities.
HR Annual Performance
Reviews
Rigid performance
objectives deter iterative
experiments.
CIOs can foster agile ways of working by changing corporate function employees’
perception of what their digital business stakeholders need. Empathy maps and
customer journey maps are typically used to identify the needs of external customers,
but CIOs and their teams can use these design-thinking tools to build empathy for
their internal customers and visualize the support internal customers need. These
visualization tools are an effective way to engage corporate center leaders in a
conversation on how perceptions and behaviors need to change to co-create the
digital business.
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To Digital Business
Enablers
Agile Plans
Agile IT funding enables
continuous product
enhancements.
Adaptive Sourcing Policies
Weighing innovation
potential against cost and
risk supports new vendor
models.
Coaching on Risk
Judgment
Data privacy training
empowers employees to
manage risks.
Ongoing Performance
Feedback
Collaborative, continuous
feedback encourages
iterative experiments.
Case in Point

To build digital dexterity in the functions that support IT and other digital business
stakeholders, Guayama IT uses design-thinking techniques that show how legacy
perceptions and behaviors slow digital business. Design-thinking specialists in IT
facilitate workshops for leaders in Guayama finance, HR and procurement. These
workshops provide end-to-end visibility into internal stakeholders’ customer journey
when working with finance, HR or procurement. To do this IT uses two key design-
thinking techniques:

1. Empathy Maps: Empathy maps are typically used to help organizations

understand the personas of external customers. Guayama IT uses empathy maps
to help functional leaders visualize the support IT and other internal stakeholders
need to succeed in digital business initiatives. The empathy maps are co-created
with these leaders in design-thinking workshops to help clarify stakeholders’
needs in digital business transformation.

2. Customer Journey Maps: Guayama IT then uses the empathy maps as a key input
for an internal customer journey mapping exercise (see Figure 8). The aim of the
customer journey map is to give functional leaders who support IT visibility into
the end-to-end interaction a stakeholder outside their function might have in
working with the function in pursuit of a digital business opportunity.

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Figure 8: Journey Map to Spot Opportunities for Change in Procurement Practices

Develop Digital Competencies

Digital competencies are among the strongest drivers of digital dexterity. Our analysis
showed that, by themselves, neither specialist skills (such as coding and product
development) nor generalist competencies (such as organizational awareness and
communication) set employees up for success in a digital business. Instead, digital
business transformation requires competencies that enable employees to easily
move across business and technology domains, collaborate with a greater variety of
stakeholders and understand the interdependencies of digital business initiatives.

Our analysis highlights five competencies as critical drivers of digital dexterity (see
Table 2).

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Table 2: Competencies for the Digital Enterprise
Competency Definition Impact on Likelihood to
Have High Digital Dexterity
1. Business Acumen Demonstrates an 9.9x
awareness of the broader
internal and external
business context.
2. Adaptability Demonstrates an openness 7.3x
to new and iterative ways
of working.
3. Political Savvy Builds and influences 5.6x
stakeholder networks
internally and externally.
4. Fusion Collaboration Collaborates effectively 4.7x
with employees with
diverse perspectives and
experiences.
5. Systems Thinking Understands the internal 4.2x
and external relationships
between technology and
processes.

CIOs should make the case for this set of digital competencies throughout the broader
enterprise. And, like other executive leaders, they are in a strong position to help
employees develop them. Our research shows that one of the most effective ways
to build proficiency in these five digital competencies is to give employees hands-on
experiences outside their functional areas; this helps employees:

■ Understand how their decisions affect other functions.

■ Build networks with peers outside of their teams.
■ Develop a deeper understanding of the company’s digital business vision and its
moving parts.

CIOs should work with their C-suite peers to identify experiences within and beyond
IT that help employees build expertise in areas critical to the organization’s digital
business plans. This could include opportunities for formal job rotations or shadowing
programs that help employees better understand the multidirectional nature of digital
business tasks and activities.

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Case in Point

Webster Bank recognized the need to improve cross-functional trust and

collaboration among peers to maximize employee engagement and organizational
performance. To ensure credible and relevant peer support throughout the
organization, Webster Bank established a shadowing program designed to improve
peers’ understanding of workflows, not just other roles.

Most shadowing programs focus on shadowing a single employee through multiple

work processes. In Webster Bank’s program, employees shadow a workflow,
which usually cuts across the roles of several employees to provide a holistic
understanding of the organization’s processes, priorities and challenges.

The CHRO can be a close ally for CIOs who are looking to build a digitally dexterous
workforce. Progressive companies are rethinking career trajectories to promote digital
competencies through talent mobility. They are moving from career ladders, where
promotion occurs within narrow job families, to “diamond-shaped” careers, where
progression is driven by the diversity of an employee’s experiences.

Intel is one example, as the company sets clear expectations for technical and
nontechnical versatility in the IT workforce by putting cross-domain exposure at
the center of career-pathing (see Figure 9). The company has redefined career
conversations by enshrining talent mobility through “career lattices” that provide staff
with lateral, diagonal and cross-domain career path options.

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Figure 9: Intel’s Career Lattices

Make Digital Dexterity a C-Suite Priority

Leaders also play a critical role in building a digitally dexterous workforce. In fact,
leadership messages, behaviors and efforts to embed digital dexterity in work
practices and processes are among the most effective ways to promote digital
dexterity. Unfortunately, few organizations have leaders who consistently do these
activities (see Figure 10).

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Figure 10: Key Leadership Activities That Drive Digital Dexterity

CIOs should work with the rest of the executive leadership team to equip other IT
and business leaders in three areas as they collectively build a digitally dexterous
workforce.

1)  Set the Tone: Craft and Tell an Effective Narrative for Digital Business
Transformation

Leadership messaging about the company’s digital business plans and the connection
of those plans to employees’ workflows have a significant impact on employees’
digital dexterity. Creating a clear connection between the company’s digital business
plans and the work of employees requires a cohesive narrative about digital business
opportunities and risks that is shared across the enterprise. Regularly discussing
with employees the company’s digital business narrative and their role in it increases
employees’ digital dexterity by as much as 2.4 times, but leaders at only 17% of
organizations do this consistently.

The most effective digital business narratives clearly articulate the organization’s
transformation journey and help employees understand how they must adapt to
support the company’s digital business vision. For instance, Intuit highlights its
mission “to be the world’s small business operating system and to do the nation’s
taxes.” Similarly, Aviva built a digital business narrative around helping “people defy
uncertainty” and driving “a rapid cultural shift to a digital-first mindset.”

Organizations that do this well ensure their digital business narrative is:

■ Transformational —It discusses business model transformation, not just

enhancements to the current business or use of new technologies.

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 ■ Customer-Centric — It emphasizes customer needs and the jobs they want to get
done.
■ Integrated —It is embedded in the corporate narrative as opposed to being a
separate narrative.
■ Relevant to Employees — It helps employees understand how to adapt their jobs
and beliefs to support digital business transformation.

Figure 11: Common Structures of Effective Narratives for Digital Business Transformation

2) Model Digitally Dexterous Behaviors

To improve employees’ digital dexterity, leaders must lead by example and personally
demonstrate the behaviors that are expected from employees. This includes
demonstrating openness toward innovation and risk taking in pursuit of digital
business opportunities; driving a mindset of continuous improvement; and adopting
more inclusive, collaborative and cross-functional ways of working. Again, only 17% of
organizations have leaders that model these behaviors consistently.

The theme that underscores these leadership behaviors is a broader shift from a
highly structured “command and control” approach toward redefining leaders’ role
as decision facilitators, not decision makers. Leaders who are effective at building
digitally dexterous teams take a more inclusive posture toward decision making and
help their teams use the broader network to co-create change decisions.

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Case in Point

Cynthia Stoddard, CIO at Adobe, recognized that work has become more complex
and interconnected and less predictable. The cross-cutting nature of digital
business initiatives further amplified the need for decision makers to seek diverse
perspectives and foster collaboration. Stoddard considers this inclusiveness to be
a critical leadership philosophy: “Leadership doesn’t have a title, and you certainly
don’t need to be a VP or a CIO to demonstrate it. Leadership and innovation can be
exercised at all levels based on the merit of ideas.”

To put this in action, Stoddard moved decision making and planning deeper into the
organization to tap into the collective wisdom of employees. IT and other leaders at
Adobe are expected to invite employees with diverse backgrounds, experiences and
expertise to “design events” that use design-thinking principles to co-create change.

The design events are an accelerated approach to co-creating change decisions and
implementation plans through a repeatable decision-making framework and are
used for a wide variety of decisions, such as managing an M&A, defining a future IT
operating model and improving the customer experience. Stoddard has redefined
the role of leaders as change facilitators, not just decision makers, and holds them
accountable for facilitating open decision making and for committing time and
resources to provide oversight of the co-created changes and implementation plans
(see Figure 12).

Figure 12: Redefining Leaders’ Roles in Change Decisions

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3) Embed Digital Dexterity in Operations

Creating an effective digital business narrative and demonstrating digitally dexterous

behaviors is not enough to build a digitally dexterous workforce. CIOs and other IT and
business leaders must also demonstrate sustained commitment to promoting digitally
dexterous behaviors by embedding digital dexterity in day-to-day operations. This
is the most impactful leadership activity for driving digital dexterity, but only 5% of
organizations have leaders who consistently ensure workflows, incentives, budgets
and policies foster, not hamper, digital dexterity.

CIOs should work with their peers to spot where enterprise processes and workflows
deter digital dexterity and offer solutions so employees can practice what the
leadership team preaches. Matching words with action involves removing process and
governance barriers to make digitally dexterous behaviors effortless. These actions
include redesigning business unit performance metrics, promoting new-in-kind and
cross-functional career trajectories and redesigning the way work gets done.

Conclusion
Many organizations today need a different kind of employee: a digitally dexterous
employee. Digital dexterity — the combination of behaviors, mindsets and beliefs that
accelerates digital business transformation — should be top of mind for all executive
leaders, and CIOs play a critical role in putting digital dexterity at the top of the CEO
agenda. To overcome the digital dexterity deficit, CIOs must educate the rest of the
C-suite on what digital dexterity is (and what it is not) and work with other enterprise
leaders to build a digitally dexterous workforce by:

■ Redesigning IT-business collaboration

■ Removing barriers to agile ways of working
■ Refocusing training and talent mobility on building digital competencies
■ Making digital dexterity a leadership priority

Recommendations
To foster digital dexterity across the enterprise CIOs should:

■ Educate the C-suite on digital dexterity — CIOs should use their cross-enterprise
networks and perspectives to educate their peers on digital dexterity and, when
required, lead the organizational changes that are essential to foster it.
■ Create an environment that enables enterprise agility — Employees develop
digital dexterity by actively participating in digital business transformation tasks
and activities. Rather than fighting such business-led IT activities, CIOs should
build teams that can provide fast and seamless access to technical and other types
of expertise where and when business partners need it.

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 ■ Build proficiency in digital competencies — Digital business transformation
requires employees to develop competencies that enable them to easily move
across business and technology domains, collaborate with a greater variety of
stakeholders and understand the interdependencies of digital transformation.
CIOs should work with their peers outside IT to foster talent mobility and
identify experiences that help employees build expertise in areas critical to the
organization’s digital business plans.
■ Make digital dexterity a leadership priority — CIOs and other business leaders
should collectively build a digitally dexterous workforce by creating a digital
business narrative that highlights the importance of digital dexterity, modelling
digitally dexterous behaviors and embedding digital dexterity in operations.

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About This Research

To develop a practical definition of digital dexterity, we tested a range of beliefs,
mindsets and behaviors (markers of digital dexterity) against a set of digital business
outcomes. We used descriptive statistics to ensure all markers and outcomes were
normally distributed. We used correlations and regression analysis to test the relative
strengths of the relationships between each potential marker of digital dexterity
and the digital business outcomes. Eleven markers of digital dexterity had strong
relationships with digital business outcomes. These markers form our model of digital
dexterity (see Figure 2). We also used factor analysis to validate that the markers
within each quadrant maintained similar response patterns and “belonged” together.
Finally, we tested for more than 200 factors to understand the drivers of digital
dexterity and spoke with more than 100 CIOs and IT leaders to find practical examples
of how CIOs help build a digitally dexterous enterprise.

© 2018 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved. 23

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Footnote
[1] Pseudonym

© 2018 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved. 24

201558295