Digital Literacy

Written by: Gary Horsman

Digital Literacy

It’s Vital for Business Success

Every business needs to learn how to react to external conditions.

Everyone in a business needs to be functionally literate and today this mean digitally literate. You have to understand the basic concepts and know what’s going on, why it’s important, what to do about, what’s expected, and so on. 

I have been involved in business for perhaps all of my adult life. I have been involved as a military contractor and as a semiconductor manufacturing executive. I have observed businesses up close and personal in Japan, Taiwan Europe and of course the United States. I can point to waves of the latest educational focus such as quality and six sigma, globalization and out-sourcing, sustainability, action-focused team building, value chain development and a few others that were also useful but not so well known.

All of these educational programs brought something to the table and made us more aware. They made us better.

Now it is time to focus again and this time the focus needs to be on digital literacy. How do you maximize the performance of your website? What analytical tools do you need to understand? How do search engines work? Should I blog and how can I leverage my blog.

What’s holding back the business community from really learning how to compete in this digital age? For one it’s harder than it may first appear.

However, we need to learn. We need to compete!

Business Is All About Competing

We need to compete to please and delight our customers, we need to develop better services, we compete against each other for position in search we compete with each other when it comes of the digital content that we create.

To do well in this economy and to prepare for the future you need to learn the skills to be successful. We are going to have to re-invent and invest in our education and our business to thrive and grow in this new digital world.

I meet a great many business people going through my week and even more over the telephone. I see a gap everywhere between what is needed to compete and what is in place to compete. I wonder if I am seeing a growing gap or a shrinking gap and I think it is the former. That’s bad news for us.

A solution is related to basic economics – supply and demand.

In this case demand is fundamentally related to the awareness of the need to become more skilled within the digital economy. The increasing awareness will stimulate demand. Once there is demand (e.g. a broad recognition that new skills are required) then we need to ensure that supply is there to match the demand. This relates to the curriculum and delivery mechanisms available to create the new skill set.

Here is a high level list of items we need to be good at:

Conceptual: What will our digital business model be? How will it be different than what we do now?

Foundational: What are the key components of a successful digital business model?

Architectural: How will the various components work together to create entirely new value-added products and services for our clients.

Strategic: How do we re-invent what we offer to our customers and make them aware of it in a digital world?

Evolutionary: How do we start and how will we evolve our digital business models.

Cautionary: What are the horror stories and what do we need to avoid as we progress our digital model initiatives.

Pragmatic: What is practical and necessary and what is a nice to have. There is a great deal of “stuff” out there and some of it is a waste of time.

Resource Identification: Do we have connections within the digital economy with the experts that can help us to not just survive but to excel.

Do we — as business people — recognize what’s happening, and what to do about it?

Not enough, I’d argue.

If you want to research more into the topic of Content Marketing and how to develop delightful targeted content needs to be part of your digital marketing model then I invite you to explore our Content Marketing Tutorials. Here is a link to the Content Marketing Introductory Tutorial.

I will also write more on this topic in the coming months. I see a growing need and therefore a growing demand. I will do my small part to help close the gap between supply and demand.