I had a meeting recently where a person used a phrase that I thought was so great I wished I’d thought of it myself.
They said they were looking for a “digital mentor” for their organisation.
Mentoring is an important activity. Most accomplished business leaders will point to a person in their lives that has helped them achieve their success. Often this is an informal process. Some of us have been lucky enough to have had great leaders at various points in our careers that we call mentors.
Many business leaders fully acknowledge the importance of mentoring and access the services of formal mentoring processes through business support groups, professional societies etc.
However, I find online discussion about digital mentoring generally focuses on the individual use of technology.
Just as individuals can benefit from working with an expert one-on-one, an organisation can also benefit from the external view.
Often an outside perspective can reveal issues that were hidden in plain sight within the organisation. In our work, we often find managers saying things like “We’re not too sure which way to go on [some aspect of our digital strategy]”. Using the mentoring approach of asking questions and listening can help the wisdom and knowledge of the organisation come to the forefront and make the answer clear.
The life of a manager in any organisation can be frenetically busy. The day-to-day demands of running a complex technology infrastructure, the client expectations for sophisticated reporting, ever-increasing demands for more security and so on can be overwhelming.
Additionally, the Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Officer may be expected to be the digital mentor for their own organisation. This adds to an already packed schedule the need to keep up-to-date with a massive and exponentially growing knowledge base on the latest trends in digital.
Engaging an external digital mentor will help with all of those issues, and, if nothing else, provides a busy executive with some perspective on the issues and challenges that they face.
Did some of the above pain points ring true? You can have a chat with us to see how your organisation would benefit from this approach. Get your own digital mentor!
Ray Delany is the Founder of CIO Studio, a company built to partner with SMEs and help them solve the “strategy” problem and align their digital investment with their business outcomes.
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