Skills and Competencies for Digital Transformation Initiatives

Abstract

The objective of the present Master Thesis was, to develop a Skills and Competencies framework, that enables companies to identify Skills and Competencies they need for their individual transformation roadmap. SkiCo (Skills and Competencies) – the developed framework – directly contributes to the ABILI (ANIMATE, BLUEPRINT, IMPLEMENT, LIVE, IMPROVE) methodology – established by the University of Applied Science and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) – that supports companies within their Digital Transformation following a companywide, holistic transformation approach. The current literature provides a divergent definition of Skills and Competencies terms and also a common classification approach or scheme for Skills and Competencies could not be identified. For the current research, Skills and Competencies are looked as different human capabilities: Skills are techniques and methods that can be acquired by education or training and can be measured in the meaning of their existence and the level of mastery using quantitative measurement methods. Competencies relate to human's personal attributes – such as motivation, emotions and attitudes, but also strategies and routines. Competencies are enablers of Skills, since the application of Skills is only possible while owing appropriate Competencies. Also, current literature about Skills and Competencies for Digital Transformation comes up with technical Skills only but does not respect the holistic approach of a Digital Transformation as the ABILI methodology aims for. Existing Skills and Competencies frameworks that were analyzed as part of the present research project are DISCO, ESCO, SFIA and KODE®X. The analysis turned out that those frameworks are too generic and do not have focus on Digital Transformation, so that their approach for structuring could not be reused for the artifact developed by the present study....