Transforming Financial Services

How can a strong, successful insurance and financial services group embrace new opportunities and develop digital talent?

This leading multinational financial services group is known for its insurance, pensions and investment management services. Recently, they have set out a bold strategy driven by emerging mega-trends shaping society, which has led them to create a series of innovative projects focused on wider social and prosperity goals.

As they evolve towards new digital business models, products and services they recognise their organisational operating system also needs to evolve to become more connected. The digital transformation agenda, sponsored by the CEO, is co-ordinated by a collaborative Digital leadership Group led by HR.

Activities

  • Planned and delivered a digital immersion day for top leaders
  • Delivered business unit level digital leadership animation sessions
  • Helped to create a Digital Leadership Group for distributed change
  • Innovative framework and visual map of digital talent across the firm
  • MVP capability map & catalogue to guide a transformation team’s portfolio 
  • New organisational thinking & advisory across Group HR activities

Results

  • Firm-wide engagement in the strategic direction of digital across the organisation
  • Network of committed digital leaders identified, co-ordinated & learning together
  • More strategic, joined up distributed digital strategy across the whole firm
  • Better understanding of digital talent needed for future organisational capabilities
  • Ongoing learning priority established for all leaders

Key Learnings

  • Learning needs to prioritise ‘hands on’ modes by embedding new ways of working
  • Emerging types of digital talent need new attraction & retention strategies
  • Mapping new capabilities helps match them to whole firm needs, not just digital teams
  • Clarifying target capabilities helps prioritise investment opportunities
  • Mapping digital talent can accelerate key decisions to buy, rent or grow core skillsets

Digital Capabilities

We helped assemble a guiding coalition of Digital Leaders from across the group to focus on shared strategic capabilities. Defining these new capabilities in simple, accessible language helped orient digital efforts and ensure they deliver shared value. Mapping these capabilities across the organisation allows leaders to see the gaps, overlaps and investment opportunities.

We also created a Minimum Viable Map to prove the methodology in one division, and embed it into the transformation team’s existing processes.

This work focused on prioritising & aligning the transformation portfolio and feeding into a continuous improvement effort across the business, and then supporting in an advisory capacity as the team finds new uses for the map.

The map covers not only current and future capabilities, but also the components needed to deliver them (software, data, services and competencies), as well as tracking maturity, status and ownership. It also links to the Digital Talent Map created with HR to improve workforce planning.

Digital Talent & Learning

Digital talent is a key focus for the group: what is it, where is it, what are the gaps, and how do we will them? We created an initial snapshot as a key input into future firm planning in 2018. Designed to leverage insights already gathered across the business units, the data and prototype visual map also helped digital leaders communicate the results & insights.

As part of this work, we helped create an innovative digital talent map and catalogue to bring to life the types of future talent needed, the scarcity of some competencies and the potential uses for this new tool.

We identified opportunities to impact talent attraction & retention, digital team building, leadership & employee self-directed learning and a more agile approach to staffing innovation projects. We also designed an up-skilling programme for HR Business Partners to help make best use of the tool.

To help with organisational alignment on digital, we have delivered a variety of learning experiences, from a strategic, digital immersion session for the top 200 leaders, to small team training in topics such as agile, new ways of working and new leadership models.

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