What are the challenges for the British digital industry today?

There are three or four key issues and the first one is the digital skills crisis. There’s not enough people with digital skills for the jobs that are available and for the way in which companies are asking for digital support. We’re in a digital skills crisis.

What is BIMA’s remit and how does it address those issues?

The British Interactive Media Association is the oldest trade association for technology. BIMA connects and supports the British digital industry. One of the things it does is to understand the skills gap that it’s member agencies have. The next part it plays is that it has a fantastic education programme for kids called Digital Day or D-Day. D-Day is to help people in schools, particularly younger people, understand what are the digital career opportunities.

What is the focus of D-Day and what have been the findings?

Digital careers is not being addressed very well in schools. Some of the ideas that kids come up with are so incredibly creative when given the platform and opportunity. If they’re doing an app design, for example, they’re not actually coding. They’re looking at what their audience is, a little bit about the branding, a little bit about how it might work, a little bit about problem solving in terms of what needs you’re addressing, rather than the actual coding per se.

What impact has digital had on the public sector?

We currently have the most transparent government in the world. I worked within the government, particularly within digital projects, for 14 years. We led the world in terms of the way in which we used digital communications. [St James helped lead the team that eventually launched gov.uk.]

How do you digitise government processes?

At the time we had half a million civil servants. How do we enable a digital programme of change? But I think what’s quite interesting is that government has done an incredibly good job of changing the way in which it delivers transactional services online. We were allowed to innovate, to try things, to test small projects and then point to their measurement and effectiveness.

What can companies learn from that approach?

What social media particularly has engendered is a way in which we now need to be much more transparent and authentic. From using smart social listening tools or having a focus of being able to understand what people are saying about your brand and your product or your service or the way in which you’ve recruited people, even your interview process now, is available. What employees love and hate about a particular role or work is all available. Companies and corporations have the opportunity to really take advantage of that. They have a really smart opportunity to listen to what people are saying, take that insight to their principles, their practice of communications, their brands products services.

What does your current role entail?

I run a digital transformation consultancy called Transmute. I help global businesses and large national businesses use digital and social media better internally. Not necessarily their marketing campaigns, but how can HR teams save money through smart use of digital and social media to hire people directly? How do you take a call centre and have it enabled for Twitter? How can you use social listening to inform your competitive strategy?

What’s one thing corporate communicators should know about digital?

If you can only undertake one thing about digital, listen, understand what your audiences think and say about you before you can put any kind of communications plan or programme together.