State of Digital Advisors in Canada 2022

Digital Maturity Group's worldwide community has been growing year by year since 2020. This year, the CDAP (Canada Digital Adoption Program) program announced by the government gave a big boost to the Canadian movement. In fact, at this point we likely have the largest active SME (Small or Medium sized Enterprise) focused digital advisor community in Canada. With this news, we have decided to create a short report regarding how we typically see digital advisors across Canada. 

In this research, we examined the members of our own community, who obtained our Digital Adoption Specialist Certification, and the members of the LinkedIn group directory of approved CDAP advisors. Thus, we examined more than 450 digital advisors and their SME businesses.

Eight out of ten digital advisors operate in four of the ten Canadian provinces: Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia. The most active digital advisor movement is in Ontario (33%), Quebec (21%) and British Columbia (17%), which parallels the numbers of the country's population distribution. Due to Quebec's and Ontario's high representation, 15 % of digital advisors are French-English bilingual. 

Most Canadian digital advisors are operating in the largest metropolises: Toronto (17%), Vancouver (15%), Montreal (13%) and Calgary (8%), and only a small percentage of them come from sparsely populated, rural areas. That is likely why the before mentioned CDAP program also started giving preference to digital advisors from these regions. 

Other typical attributes of this community are their abashed professional and academic experiences. It has been confirmed that most digital advisors have university degrees and have each amassed over ten years of experience. More than 80% of them share these attributes. The most popular universities are the University of Montreal, the University of Toronto, and the Laval University. The third one from this list is surprising because, although Laval University is the 15th best higher education institution in Canada, it is not among the best in technology, marketing, business, and AI (Artificial Intelligence) topics schools.  

The most significant essential trait for a digital advisor is their business development experience (63%). However, their expertise also involves consulting, operation, information technology, marketing, and entrepreneurship functions. The importance of the entrepreneurship function and the offerings comes from the fact that most of them are entrepreneurs, with most of their active digital advisor companies coming from small businesses with 1-10 employees. Companies of this size equate to about 57% of all small and medium size digital advisor businesses. A top challenge for these advisors is their ability to delegate many of the tasks associated with creating Digital Adoption Plans. This can result in an inability to scale their Digital Transformation Practices.  

Middle-sized digital advisor companies with over 15-20 employees already have dedicated advisors. Usually, they dedicate more resources to gradually implement the proper tools, templates, processes, and best practices to scale their Digital Transformation Practices. 

The typical problem was that MSPs (IT Managed Services Providers), CSSPs (Cyber Security Service Providers), and Digital Sales and Marketing Agencies tried to implement digital transformation services quickly without any previous development phase. The situation further worsened when the CDAP program was announced, so companies appeared on the market who took advantage of the opportunity and wanted to support the sale of their already existing range of services with state funds, completely bypassing the previously mentioned organic development processes. 

A digital advisor must deliver an engaging and recurring business consultancy in a limited time to maintain the profitability of these services. However, many of these MSPs, CSSPs, and Digital Sales and Marketing Agencies continue a marketing or technical conversation with their clients without any business and strategic purposes. Unfortunately, clients keep seeing them as simple marketers or IT technicians rather than as executive-level business digital advisors, thus adding confusion in the marketing around the true value of Digital Transformation. 

Fortunately, those who are not adequately prepared tend to remove themselves from the certification process we have in place, and ISED pays close observation to the approved advisors taking part in the CDAP program.  

However, one may naturally wonder about the aspects a successful MSPs, CSSPs, and Digital Sales and Marketing Agencies must take into account when acting as a digital advisor. The answer lies within the inquiry. Throughout the digital alteration of a business, it is necessary to address more than just isolated IT, security, or marketing issues. 

Instead of this, a digital advisor must focus on a big view that is commonly referred to as a digital transformation strategy - Use a straightforward process to generate a digital vision, a digital strategy, an implementation roadmap, and an execution plan to enable client employees or third-party providers to help the organization to thrive. 

Furthermore, a Digital Advisor also must focus  

• on digital platforms by seizing emerging business opportunities - Identify organizational bottlenecks and select either e-commerce, social media, or service platforms to increase marketing, sales, or operational results. 
• on applications through effective utilization of software solutions - Assess current application portfolios, business capabilities and help the organization to articulate requirements and generate an application modernization plan.
• on risk by managing the security of digital transformation - Identify the business, infrastructure, executive, user, and client risks of the current digital situation and address the hotspots.
• on processes by enhancing operation efficiency - Identify needed processes (confusion) or lack of process automation (manual work) and plan standard operating procedures and applications to support those processes.
• on people by team collaboration - Assess and plan communication and collaboration among teams to not just select proper applications but plan the adoption and training.
• on information by enabling quick, more informed decisions - Assess the information needs of executives and managers then identify the current silos of information and plan an analytical and reporting structure that can engender more informed decision making. 

Of course, the reader is right to ask whether there are super-consultants with such complex knowledge and skills that SMEs (Small or Medium sized Enterprise) can afford. According to our experience, there are few such consultants, but there are applications, templates and peer group support options that are designed to fill these gaps. In addition, if these applications, templates, and peer group members operate in a similar framework and based on similar processes, their operation becomes more efficient, secure, and interoperable.