What is Digital Leadership or Who are Digital Leaders?

Based on what I have understood from this course, digital leadership involves the application of digital technologies; social media, mobile, business analytics, business data, Internet of Things, and cloud computing (SMACI) to transform every area of a business in order to improve the customer experience and by so doing outdo competitors. 

So, digital leadership matters a lot. Since its inception, technology has been transforming the way things are done and those that cannot catch up risk becoming obsolete. Strategy, in my opinion, has to do with winning and competition. I think leaders have to take a strategic view of digital technologies in order to be able to exploit them to their advantage as stakeholders would want to see how the investment or adoption of digital technologies will improve the business.

Following from the above, it can be said that a digital leader is one who is digitally knowledgeable, and in combination with business skills, is willing to adopt digital technologies as per the above and empower the employees to develop digi-capabilities to improve the business. 

I would say that today’s digital leaders are those that are driving the digital trend and using it to improve the way they do business. I was just looking at http://www.globaldigitalleaders.com about the Annual Summit of Global Digital Leaders in May 2016 in Berlin, Germany and speakers include representatives from various organisations such Valtech, Germany, Whirlpool Corporation, USA, Verint Systems GmbH, Germany, Google, UK, Barclays Africa, South Africa, NBC News, USA; Travelex, UK, AXA, Indonesia, and a lot more. These I would say are digital leaders of today and it shows that digital leadership is taken very seriously by many and a wide range of organisations.