In May 2011, I had the opportunity to speak at Reiten & Co‘s Strategic Meeting in beautiful Oslo, Norway. I spoke with Senior Level Managers and CEOs from Reiten’s group of portfolio companies about some of the challenges and opportunities facing today’s digital organizations.

In spite of the over-abundance of “social media experts” there seems to be very few people talking about the more operation-oriented perspective of what it means to be using these tools internally. One of the things I focus on is the evolution of digital as a marketing tool to a full strategic function within an organization.

This requires a shift in both macro processes (strategic planning, recruiting and retention, flex time policies) and micro processes (content plans, job descriptions, metric development). Senior management needs to be aware of the changes they will need to make in these areas and how it will alter the cultures of their organizations.

From an HR perspective there have been a slew of new positions created to address this new need. For example, take a look at these newly created positions that have recently been filled in the past two years:

Oxfam (2009) – Head of Digital Communications

The World Economic Forum (2010)- Head of Content & Digital

Bauer Media (2010) – Head of Digital Sales

Nestle (2011) – Global Digital Chief

All of these positions show that management is finally catching up to the slew of junior/mid-level positions (brand evangelist, social media manager, digital community manager) that were created during the last five years to work on the more tactical side of digital. I’m happy to see this area being taken seriously by c-suite executives.

I’ll write about this in a bit more detail in a few weeks since I’ll be exploring it more fully for my work on ArchiTechs. I also had the amazing opportunity to take a few days and explore the rest of Norway by car with Jesse, and I’ll be detailing our adventures in a separate post, so stay tuned!