Page 77 - AC/E's Digital Culture Annual Report 2015

AC/E Digital Culture Annual Report 201577will also need to equip themselves with these skills, either because they will use technology or because they will produce it. Lastly, in procedures that support the organisation’s core business, there can also be an external digital technical competence that is managed through outsourcing processes.The study Cliente@2.033 (PWC, 2014) men- tions seven technologies (sensors, wearables, big data, cloud computing, 3D printing, augmented reality and robotics) and eight technological applications (the Internet of Things, smart cities/ things, re-marketing, automation of knowledge, pretail/crowdfunding, neuromarketing, industri- al robotics and assisted point of sale purchases) that companies should master in order to know how to generate value from them.While it is true that many new companies’ way of generating value is chiefly digital, it is no less certain that many existing companies operate in the physical world, either because their services or products are physical or simply because they require material resources to provide or manu- facture them. In the latter case, in order to guide the necessary transformation and make use of the technologies and technological applications that progressively emerge on the market, the figure of Chief Digital Officer (CDO) has recently appeared – a new role which, according to Gartner, will exist in 25% of companies (Rosselet, V., 2014).Based on the idea that “everything that can be digital will be digital” (Kim, P., 2014, p. 2), it is the CDO’s task to formulate the digital business strategy that involves incorporating digital technology into its business model, setting inmotion the related operational initiatives, and managing the transformation of the organisation that all this entails (ibid.). As producing a digital reformulation of the business model necessarily requires the existence a series of skills derived from these three actions, it is logical to assume that the CDO will be involved in detecting and developing them.Professionals will have to replace some skills with others and adapt their knowledge to the fast-paced evolution of digital technology.Perhaps the most critical aspect of this reflection is that it is highly likely that the technology available today will soon be surpassed by the discoveries and advances that are increasingly taking place. While this holds true for any area of knowledge, in the case of digital technolog- ical competence it is even more evident that professionals will have to replace some skills with others and adapt their knowledge to the fast-paced evolution of digital technology. In many cases this learning will no longer depend on the training schemes run by the organisations for which they work but on their ability to learn autonomously.Self-directed learningOne of the variables that evolve over time is how people learn: different generations learn differently (Reeves, T. C., 2014). Today two factors are bringing about a significant change in this area. On the one hand, the digitalJesús Alcoba