Digitalization of Leaders - Concept of Digital Leader
Digital leadership is the strategic use of a company's digital assets to achieve business goals. It can be addressed at both an institutional and an individual level. At the individual level, digital leadership can be exercised by the CIO or others responsible for overseeing digital assets, including email and electronic documents. Regardless of an individual's job title, an effective digital leader is always aware of corporate goals and how their own job responsibilities support them.
At the enterprise level in a given market, a digital leader may be a company that successfully leverages its own digital assets to gain and maintain competitive advantage.
So what does a successful leader do?
A successful digital leader understands and takes responsibility for the data and the processes that support it within the company, as well as the digital information the company generates in the various ecosystems in which it participates.
Organizations that value digital leadership often value communication, creativity, and the willingness to explore new ways in which technology and digital information can be used to successfully address outward-looking business projects, internal projects, operations, and projects that affect ad hoc business. With effective digital leadership, an organization can create workflow and business processes that enable rapid rollout of new applications, products, and services while keeping legacy applications and IT operations at optimum levels.
So, do these digital wishes work for a single sector? Of course not, digital leadership is not specific to a particular industry, it exists in economies in different parts of the world.
To give an example, it dates back 20 years to the South Asian shipping industry. At that time, the use of computers to create electronic purchase orders was in its infancy. Countries like Malaysia, South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, and Singapore competed fiercely to become ports of origin for goods and shipments in international trade.
Over time, countries realized that if they could not come together and build digital leadership, they would fall behind the interests of Europe and America. In 1994, South Korea drafted the first national legislation on electronic commerce (e-commerce), about seven years before the United States introduced a national legal framework for online purchasing.
What is the future of this digital leadership?
There is a tremendous opportunity for CIOs to redefine their role in business and step forward rather than stepping back from assuming the responsibilities of digital leadership. CIOs have access to the technology and data needed to assume accountability and deliver digital value across the company.