Introduction

TLDR: digitaldexterity.techytechster.com

Digital Dexterity is a buzz word in companies these days, everyone seems to define it differently and no one can objectively say 'it is x y z and you measure it with b'. Depending on where you read you may come into the general consensus that digital dexterity is a build up of multiple agreed upon skills and/or mindsets rather then just digital literacy. How do you measure this when its hard to objectively measure a mindset, e.g. how do we know that x person is 'Aware of their self efficacy', depending on what you read there are great solutions and there are poor solutions to measuring behaviors and mindsets. So we know that its hard to define and its also hard to measure, but is there actually value in measuring something like this, well according to Gartner 'High digital dexterity in an organization increases the likelihood of successful digital transformation by 3.3 times', so the answer to this is that it is important.

What's The Problem?

The problem that I have hoped to at least start on solving is the step of 'defining digital dexterity' and 'measuring digital dexterity' within a organization.

What Have I Built As A Starting Point

I have built a open source solution that measures a series of behaviors and mindsets such as 'Self Sufficient Learning', you can read them all here. I in no way believe that every company/person is going to agree with the behaviors and mindsets I have listed here, but that's why its open source, an organization could hypothetically take this solution into there environment, modify/add new behaviors and then deploy it to measure what they believe is a digitally dexterous person.

Is It Complete? (i.e is this a solved problem)

No, the way I have gone about measuring digital dexterity could be seen as a naiive approach to measuring & defining digital dexterity, however, this gets the conversation started in your organization and hypothetically gives the organization a starting ground to build upon.

What Can It Do?

The tool I have created will allow users to measure themselves and then get others to measure them against a series of behaviors/mindsets, using these evaluations they will then see whether maybe they are overrating themselves in some parts or underrating. Take the two examples below:

Example 1: Jimmy

Jimmy is a timid person in LeftBank Co where he believes himself to be a average employee that doesn't really think he excels at anything, we can cross reference this at the graph above and see that he values each of his behaviors quite low, however, when we look at what his employees see about him which is that he is actually quite a digitally dexterous person (and they rate his self-efficacy low which is a good indicator to say he doesn't believe in himself basically).

Example 2: Jeremy

Jeremy has a reputation of being a overconfident talker at RightBank Co where he is seen as being able to talk a lot, but when it comes to it he actually isn't that digitally dexterous. He has had managers in the past tell him this but he doesn't believe it and believes the managers to simply be misguided. After taking his mandatory digital dexterity review and looking at the graph, he can see that the majority of people in his company have rated him as quite low in digital dexterity (apart of self-efficacy) and this tells him that maybe they are saying something he needs to look into.

Techstack

Please note that the solution has been designed with microservices in mind, this means that if a company has a need of using x frontend instead of my web consumer, they can simply point a new frontend at the REST API and it should hypothetically be identical (once they code the new frontend).

Consumer Service

The consumer is a typical web consumer consisting of the following:

• ReactJS Framework (Typescript)
• pnpm to install packages/maintain scripts
• Docker to allow running on any system easier
• Deployed On Github Pages

Backend Service

The backend is a REST API consisting of the following:

• Golang
  • Echo Framework
  • GORM (Golang ORM to interact with DB)
• Docker to allow running on any system easier
• Pulumi to make deploying on kubernetes easy
• Planetscale MySQL Database (Works well as I can branch for each branch I create in github)
• Deployed On Kubernetes On OKE (Oracle Managed Kubernetes)

Future Work

• When deployed in a organization it could be worthwhile to investigate adding bias to peer reviews of your digital dexterity, e.g. a line manager's review is probably more indicative of being accurate then your friend.