Digital Technology as a Leadership Strategy
As we wrap up the year and anticipate a new year, I know one of the wishes most leaders would have been to return to normal. In between having dealt with a worldwide shutdown and supply chain challenges to Great Resignation over the last approximately three years, leaders are looking forward to a post-pandemic unwind.
Leaders must be vigilant that it may not be easy to unwind. There are other issues that leaders will need to address, including a rapidly slowing economy, high inflation, and colossal employee demand.
Leaders will need to define their strategies clearly, and strictly follow them to be successful. There is a common theme amongst leaders with pressing questions to which leaders must have answers.
One of the biggest realizations for many organizations is the importance of digital technology and the paradigm shift in leadership initiatives. Many organizations increased their budgets and investments in innovation, technology, and leadership as critical business strategies.
Digital technology will be pivotal in the post-pandemic world for many organizations. The relevant abilities, skills and customer-centric organization will be necessary if organizations want to leap ahead of the competition.
An article authored by Deloitte consulting team, in their writing, A new language for digital transformation, outlined five imperatives to drive digital transformation.
Experiences: Focuses on creating interactions that are seamless, efficient, productive, secure, differentiated, and joyous for users, whether a customer, part of the workforce or another stakeholder within the ecosystem.
Insights: Assesses what data, analysis, operating model, and workforce are required to enable business, product, customer, or workforce strategies.
Platforms: Focuses on how information needs to be stored, processed, networked, and secured across an organization with various potential technologies available.
Connectivity: Involves information flow considerations in terms of how platforms, experiences, and insights are powered, touching on the future of the internet and networking with other organizations/ecosystems.
Integrity: Focuses on driving purpose and improving resilience, security, and trust across all internal and external facing business systems and processes and involves creating a cyber-minded culture enterprise-wide to address continuously evolving threats.
Providing vision and purpose and creating the conditions for people to experiment, along with the ability to empower people to think differently and get people to collaborate across boundaries, will be effective traits for digital leadership.
The ultimate success of an excellent digital strategy and digital leadership lies with practical strategic thinking, having the ability to think big picture, change orientation, creating a culture to enable smooth implementation of technical solutions and a growth mindset, and the power and motivation for leaders to continuously learn and improve, both for themselves and those they lead, for the road ahead.
