William Douglas, chief marketing officer EMEA, JLL
“I’m a member of JLL’s EMEA board
and have global responsibility for
brand. We have 217 people in
marketing across 21 countries in
the EMEA region, including a pan-
EMEA marketing leadership team.
We deliver business line marketing,
digital marketing, marketing
communications and creative
services to our EMEA
business, which employs
around 12,500 people.
Digital transformation, in
my opinion, is too broad a
term and can feel a bit
overwhelming or generic.
We started our digitalisation
journey in marketing
by focusing on our
mundane
analogue
problems, such
as how to
reach our
target audience
more effectively
and gain
insights into
their needs, and
looking for
digital solutions that
are attractive not
only because
they are fast, but
because the
tracking is far superior to
analogue approaches.
We worked with a number of
external partners on this, including
technology providers, digital media
consultants and data and analytics
consultants. This space is not short on
consultants trying to help, and some
prove more valuable than others. I
would recommend looking for
partners offering speci c solutions
and who are prepared to grind
out a dedicated solution for
you. Avoid wide-ranging digital
consulting projects.
Speaking generally, digital
marketing has had a
rollercoaster journey in terms of
measuring and selling its
own success. At the
beginning, because
measurement in
such a speci c way
was so new and
exciting, there
were teams set
up to spend
time putting
together
huge
dashboards on
digital metrics that
nobody understood,
and which didn’t
easily correlate to a
started to question the validity of
the measurements.
I, and many other marketing
to simplify and scale back how and
what we measure to focus on the
most commercially relevant metrics.
I think this is normal and to be
expected when data that you’ve
never had before comes ooding in;
people have a tendency to overreport
it and connect things that
don’t necessarily connect. But
it does settle.
My advice would be to control the
technology directly. Though IT is an
important partner, you can’t be
ghting for budget priority. You need
to have direct budget responsibility for
the supporting tech.
You’ve also got to be prepared for
people to not like what they hear.
Getting your hands on more data
and uncovering new insights is all well
and good, but some people are
happy not to know. Be aware that
change in one part of the business
usually doesn’t happen in isolation.
Eventually it touches everyone and
not everyone is prepared for this
at rst.”
People have a
tendency to
over-report
it and
connect
things that
don’t
necessarily
connect
to advance their own digital competencies. Concerns that HR is
beset by a digital skills gap are given further credence by the Global
Leadership Forecast survey, which found that HR leaders lag far
behind other professionals in their ability to operate in a highly
digital environment and to use data to guide business decisions.
This can’t be put down to lack of opportunities, given the HR
software market is on course to exceed $10 billion by 2022,
according to a Grand View Research report.
The resources, it seems, are there for the taking. But HR is
trailing behind other functions in successfully exploiting the
opportunities that digital technology brings.
So it stands to reason that HR should be taking inspiration from
other functions that are further along on the journey. Here, three
function heads share their experiences of digital transformation in
their business areas and offer some lessons for HRDs to apply to
their own. HR
commercial outcome. In addition,
there was a cycle of overselling where
the rest of the business leaders – often
outside of the marketing function –
leaders, took a stand a few years ago
HR Technology Supplement Digitalisation lessons
20 HR October 2019 hrmagazine.co.uk
/hrmagazine.co.uk