What's the Difference Between DX and IT Professionals?

公開日: 2024-06-17

This article clarifies the distinction between Digital Transformation (DX) and IT professionals, detailing the strategic thinking and transformative leadership skills required of DX professionals versus the technical expertise and problem-solving abilities of IT professionals. Understanding these differences is essential for companies to successfully implement DX by recruiting and utilizing appropriate talent. Through concrete examples, we examine the importance of DX professionals and their role.

What’s the Difference Between DX and IT Professionals?

Introduction

Digital Transformation (DX) has become a critical keyword in modern business. However, the term “DX professional” is often confused with “IT professional.” Business executives and HR managers need to correctly understand the differences between these roles to recruit and utilize appropriate talent effectively.

What is a DX Professional?

A DX professional is not merely someone with IT literacy. What’s required of DX professionals is a broad perspective and strategic thinking. They possess the ability to not only implement technology but also to review entire business processes and drive business model innovation.

Key Skills and Characteristics

Strategic Thinking: DX professionals deeply understand the company’s overall strategy and propose ways to leverage digital technology to achieve it.
Transformative Leadership: Beyond introducing new technologies, they drive organizational culture change and promote mindset shifts among all employees.
Business Understanding: They possess more than just technical knowledgeu2014they have the ability to sensitively detect business trends and market changes.

What is an IT Professional?

In contrast, IT professionals are specialists primarily focused on technical skills. They are involved in system development, operation, and maintenance, playing a role in supporting the company’s IT infrastructure.

Key Skills and Characteristics

Technical Expertise: They possess advanced technical skills in programming, network management, system design, and more.
Problem-Solving Ability: They quickly resolve technical issues such as system troubleshooting and performance optimization.
Continuous Learning: Given the rapid evolution of technology, they must maintain an attitude of constantly learning the latest knowledge.

Concrete Examples

For instance, if a company assigns an IT professional to lead its DX initiatives, they might first search for new IT tools and focus entirely on implementing them. However, this alone doesn’t lead to company-wide transformation.

In contrast, a DX professional first understands the company’s current state and goals, carefully identifies necessary technologies, reviews the entire business process, and comprehensively promotes organizational transformation.

Let’s look at a specific case. Currently, there’s discussion about integrating the My Number card with health insurance cards in Japan. While the My Number card aims for efficiency through digitalization, its integration with health insurance cards might be considered mere IT implementation rather than transformation. What’s important is whether this IT implementation is truly convenient for citizens. In reality, there are many disadvantages and frequent problems. This could be attributed to a lack of digital transformation (DX) perspective.

Conclusion

DX professionals and IT professionals have different roles and skill sets. For companies to successfully implement digital transformation, it’s important to understand these differences and place appropriate talent in suitable positions.

By bringing in DX professionals, companies can expect to dramatically improve their overall competitiveness, going beyond mere technology implementation. We encourage business executives and HR managers to reconsider their talent strategies with this perspective in mind.