Your point is interesting – I have spoken to digital directors who have said their plan is to make their role redundant – so need to update the diagrams – Absolutely can see what you’re suggesting here – it seems a natural move in a larger business that the central digital team will shrink through time as digital skills are disseminated more widely in marketing roles.

The ultimate is for that team to disappear, but more usually, in my experience there is a need for a “Centre of Excellence” team which sets strategies, priorities, roadmaps, follows the latest developments, sets strategy, manages the Martech platform or at least decisions with IT.

In your case this function must still exist within marketing.

There is another model where there is NO digital department or evangelist. That may sound mad, but we ultimately need to get to a stage where everyone is digital and it doesn’t need a separate department at all.

One of our clients made their entire digital team redundant a couple of years ago. My initial reaction was incredulous but I then found out that all the individuals were encouraged to apply for marketing roles and that the goal was simply to remove the silo and to ensure that ‘digital’ was in the dna of all their marketers. Visionary perhaps?

The reality is that the hybrid model will be the most successful in the short to medium term. Interestingly, the client I mentioned reverted back to having a (much smaller) digital excellence team to support the business.

Another massive challenge is finding and retaining the best digital talent. You can have the best team structure in the world, but you need quality individuals to fill those roles.