How Mitsui & Co. cultivates a digital-first culture to transform

Tokyo-headquartered Mitsui & Co. promotes digital transformation by combining operational technology, business insight, sales ability, and logistics capabilities with digital power such as robotics and big data. The company’s DX comprehensive strategy, formulated in 2021, consists of a digital transformation (DX) effort that combines the power of digital technology with data held by each of its business sites to create new value. There’s also a data-driven management strategy that makes quick and accurate decisions.

But underpinning it all is the DX human resources strategy, which aims to produce next-generation management talent, and establish continuous innovation as a part of Mitsui & Co.’s corporate culture.

The HR strategy also classifies the people who’ll be responsible for DX into three types: business human resources, who have business knowledge; DX business human resources, those familiar with business as well as digital; and DX technical human resources who have primarily digital skills.

The need for DX business talent

Mitsui believes it isn’t possible to advance its DX strategy with just the business and DX technical talent since there’s a huge gap between the two. And not only do they not communicate well, they also have difficulty cooperating. So to fill the gap, the company saw it needed to focus on producing the DX business talent.

“We call this total DX deployment, and one aspect of it is to raise the DX literacy of all employees,” says Eishi Kamatani, who helps manage HR strategy in the digital comprehensive strategy department. “We need to advance DX by combining business and digital, and we’ll work with external data scientists as necessary.”

Mitsui & Co. began developing DX business talent in late 2020, and the DX talent certification system was launched the next year to certify talent who meets certain criteria, such as having advanced DX skills and practicing it in their work.

This certification system is divided into several stages based on knowledge and experience, and certification is given every six months, which is recorded in the personnel register. From the third round, the number of applications from overseas corporations has been expanded.

Developing the talent base

While the DX talent program evaluates experience to implement projects within the company, the DX academy offers courses, including DX skills training, for all executives and employees, ranging from basic to applied courses to develop advanced DX talent. There’s also a boot camp and DX executive education to send employees to overseas universities to gain skills and knowledge, and build a network with advanced DX specialists.

For example, by taking two or more basic courses and passing a confirmation test, employees can gain experience in improving business processes using RPA and become certified DX practitioners, which is recommended for all employees.

“It’s difficult to raise the DX literacy of all employees through the total DX deployment initiative,” says Kamatani. “But we came up with a variety of ideas to get employees working toward it, such as having division and department heads use the company intranet to introduce success stories that show how employing DX can greatly improve work results.”

Another idea was to create a dashboard that displays an overview of course completion status to stimulate a companywide competitive spirit.

So with all of its methods, this training system plays an important part in progressing career paths. If you’re certified as a DX talent, for instance, you’re in the ledger and used as a reference when hiring or promoting someone. And if you’re promoted to the next stage and are successful, your compensation will increase as a result. Yet some still need convincing about DX.

“Power BI can be used to make data-based decisions, for instance, and that’s extremely useful, but there are some who don’t understand the need for it since they don’t have any problems with their daily work,” says Kamatani.

So less experienced, or B1, tech talent is required to take not only a basic course but also three applied courses, as well as two DX projects, one in which they must act as a leader. The activities in DX promotion organizations also greatly impact the digital strategy department. And with support from DX, the IT department saw they could contribute greater value.

“The department previously in charge of our internal systems has now become the driving force behind transformation, using digital technology as a weapon,” says Kamatani. “Our department is quantifying the value contribution made by DX, and it’s become clear how much success we’ve achieved, which gives us a sense of how much we’re contributing to our group.”

The digital strategy department alone has already started about 400 projects and conducted 100 PoCs, commercializing 50 of them through investment. Going forward, the department plans to further focus on developing DX business human resources. With this kind of momentum, Mitsui aims to have more than 1,000 in-house DX business personnel and practitioners by spring 2026.

“We often hear about the need for IT human resource development because companies are implementing digital transformation, but they haven’t decided what kind of work they’ll do,” says Tatsuya Ichishi, Gartner’s senior director analyst in the research and advisory division. “I think that’s a bit strange. First you need to decide what kind of work you want them to do. If there’s no one with those skills, you have to look at hiring from outside or develop internal employees. I think learning essential IT skills should be compulsory, but this doesn’t mean developing AI operating principles or machine learning. It’s rather Windows shortcut keys, basic analytical functions in Excel, and security education. Above all, this is an issue that needs to be considered from a work perspective, not a digital transformation one.”