In recent times, digital leadership has become the most significant buzzword across the corporate world. The digital leadership – strategic utilization of an organization’s digital assets intended towards the achievement of specific business goals. It can be successfully addressed at both, individual as well as organizational levels.

At an individual level, digital leadership might be accomplished by those who are in charge of digital assets such as e-mails and computerized documents, while at the organization level; it can be achieved through digital leaders who drive major transformational changes that enhance the overall revenue by proving outstanding customer experiences and creating loyalty.

The Role of Digital Leader

The digital leaders are must cultivate an innovation-oriented approach by exploring various ways in which the advanced technologies can be utilized, thus enabling the organization to respond quickly to the ever-changing customer expectations and dynamic business requirements. The successful digital leaders acknowledge these requirements, take the essential responsibilities, and opt for the necessary steps to modify or re-build crucial inbound processes along with the outbound processes that involve numerous ecosystems of those the organization is part of. By focusing on creativity and readiness, the firms can successfully seek out different ways in which the latest technologies and digital data can be utilized to address unproductive business projects and processes, including both - inbound as well as outbound.

Any organization that is empowered with efficient digital leadership is well-capable of creating new advanced business process and workflow to design new products, services, and applications, and is enabled to ensure the optimal productivity of the traditional technologies. Here, the role of a digital leader becomes more significant than ever! The digital leader ought to focus on improving the pivotal aspects of the digital assets belonging to the firm and provide valid information for the other members of C-suite such as CFO, COO, and Head of HR department to take crucial decisions associated with the business strategies. For that reason, digital leaders must retain the value of quality, reliability, and functionality of whatever digital data they are offering to their associates.

Because in case the digital data is invalid and unreliable, the key executives of the company can’t be able to carry out their responsibilities. For example, the directors of HR department cannot make proper decisions related to hiring if their systems enable false applications for prospective employment without authenticating credentials and abilities. The COOs can’t smoothly run the operations of the manufacturing plant if they are unable to get the right input on raw materials supply. The information backed with trusted, dependable, & authentic facts and figures, assists executives to make smart business decisions at a quicker rate.

Digital Leadership and Impact on CIOs

Prior to discussing the impact of digital leadership on the CIOs, let’s revisit the days when the CIOs were mostly regarded as the jockey of box & wire and were considered responsible for common day-to-day operations of the organization. However, at the present times, along with the evolution of new applications and technologies, several new roles have been emerged within an organization to deal with various aspects of digital data and assets. All these new titles such as Chief Data Office, Data Management Executive, Chief Trust Officer, and Information Governance Lead are successfully attempting to fill the present void across the corporate leadership.

Let’s take a quick look at an example to understand what it meant by digital leadership and its importance. Around 20 years back, at the time when most of the western countries were attempting to adopt advanced technology related to generation of computerized purchase orders, while the East Asian countries such as Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and South Korea were struggling to rise as significant ports in the global trading environment in terms of shipment and merchandising.

Over time, these countries realized if they could not unite and set up digital leadership, they would be surely left far behind by their western counterparts. Well, during 1994, even before the formation of the US’s legal frame, South Korea has been drafted its first legislation for online shopping and eventually emerged as the digital leader in the e-commerce sector at that time.

From Business Point Of View

Today, as stated by Jack Welch – Former Chairman and CEO of General Electric, the leadership can be summed up in two words - truth and trust. To ensure a maximum standard for quality and functional value of the company’s digital assets, the business must show trust in the persons those providing information as well as responsible for digital assets. Even though, the deliberating evaluation and validating digital information requires a lot of time, however, the organizations can take necessary steps quickly once the data interpreted in a proper way and achieve competitive advantage.

Take Away

The future might offer enormous opportunities for CIOs to reinvent their position in business process and move forward across the hierarchy by assuming various responsibilities associated with digital leadership. Regardless of whether CIOs are the significant part of business strategies, ecosystems, and transformations or not, by acquiring important skills such as great communication, potentiality to leverage analytics, ability to navigate innovation & change, they can certainly drive the organizations’ digital agendas.

About Author: Sandy is working as an application developer at one of leading outsources application development services providers and aws consulting partner. Right now I am working on web app development project. So I do research, write and share some updates about Digitalisation in Business. I hope you may like this article. Please share your views in the comment.