Silas Partners as Chief Digital Officer

The Agitator is, well agitating, but that’s the point. You have to respect a blog that has a category called “You Should be Fired.” Their latest post in this category discusses the need for a Chief Digital Officer, someone who is concerned with all the digitial communication of your organization. After detailing some specifics, this graph sums it up well:

These are considerable responsibilities. It’s a bigger job than “webmaster.” It requires both broad vision and technical insight. It’s a role that must challenge existing silos and old habits. It requires interaction with all other parts of your organization. It’s a role for a champion. As such, it’s a senior position, reporting to the top.

I think that Silas Partners can fill this role for organizations. Finding a person with both broad vision and technical insight isn’t easy nor is building a team with those characteristics. We’ve been working on building that team here at Silas Partners, there are some gaps to build filled, but overall we have the skills we need to do this.

The most striking part of this position is how it moves amoung the silos that many organizations create. I see us doing that more and more with our clients. We are “hired” by the marketing department, but by the end of the project we have helped to put together and lead a number of cross-functional teams.

The part that is often missing is the “reporting to the top.” Often we are one or two levels removed from the ultimate and/or strategic decision makers and that is frustrating.

Overall I’m hopeful that more organizations realize the digitial communication is not just a way to do what we used to do faster and with more bells and whistles, but a new way of doing things that requires specialized knowledge and management.