Week 1: Welcome from the Team
- All of them are interrelated and they’re becoming more and more important for business- independently, on location, on the country, on the industry, because their technologies are becoming more and more embedded into the business model of the companies.
- Just making sure that your technologies are perfectly aligned with your business model so you know how to strategically grow and develop your customers to sell.
- A new digital technology wave is coming and it’s inevitably putting more pressure on businesses, independent of the size, small and large and medium.
- Well, this course will allow independently who you are in your background- we’ll introduce you to the digital technologies and we’ll allow you to do your first steps towards becoming an e-leader, to making sure that you pick up the right technology for your business that can be aligned with your business model, and in fact change your business model in the way that you’re more agile and you can reflect faster with the technology to any changes in the market.
Week 1: What we’ll cover in Week 1
- Firstly, we want you to ask yourselves whether you’re really knowledgeable about new digital technology.
- Secondly, we want you to think about who is a digital leader.
- Historically, most organisations have separated IT or technology competencies, technology skills, from leadership and senior management.
- Finally, we want you to think about what it is that makes digital leadership really good.
Week 1: Three dimensions of digital leadership
- If digital leadership is new, what is it that’s new? Well the three dimensions are all elements that have been in existence for many years.
- What’s new about digital leadership is the way the three dimensions are brought together and integrated in a new form of organisational leadership.
- ICT capability means the awareness and knowledge of job new digital technologies, whether that was cloud computing or new apps or data analytics or whatever might be relevant for your particular organisational setting.
- Business acumen refers to all of the operational side of the business or the organisation that requires those digital leaderships to have a real understanding and a real expertise in the organisation of the business from the sourcing right the way through to the selling, including all of the internal resourcing of that through marketing and finance and so on.
- Building on the knowledge that we’ve got here at Henley along with our business partners in Europe during the results of the interviews and an online survey we have identified what are the main issues and what are the main criteria that business is looking for within each of those dimensions.
- Big data analysis, mobility, new mobile apps, and again, coming back to the big data and business analytics, unstructured mining data, content analysis or what is known as semantic technologies.
- Internet of Things, ICT architecture, IT and business architecture alignment, web development, social media toolkits-specifically for the new startup and the businesses on the early growth stage- are very important.
- So within the business dimensions, champions are looking for the digital marketing tools, the CRM engagement with their customers, and understanding their customers better, understanding their needs.
- Well, within the business dimension, of course, there’s other skills, the skills of market research skills, information about the markets.
- Well, for example, how long is your- your product is on the shelf? Or when are you introducing a new product? What’s the percentage of your sales that are coming from new products? For your firm, what are the percentage of the sales coming from the new product to your market? Have you done any process innovation? What are- is there any hidden innovation in your business, something that you’re not capturing by your accounting, but is there, like within the process of your production or introducing new product and services? Here we would also include some market knowledge, the knowledge of your competitors and collaboration, the level of and the importance of collaboration with your external partners.
- So what are the activities that you are emphasising and you’re working on in terms of increasing the range of products, your vision to enter new markets, to experiment with new products and services, maybe to leverage and minimise the environmental impact, increase health and safety, collaboration and the time it will take you to introduce new products? So all this will enter within the strategic dimension.
Week 1: What makes a digital leader?
- Digital leader or leader in the digital age is anyone of us who would want to do their first steps toward the digital leader.
- So in the end you have an understanding of your market, but you also see what technology is useful and could help you to enter the market and to win the customers.
- So to be able to identify the right technology, to recognise the opportunity, and then perhaps transform this technology for your business.
- It is a leader that understands the new digital wave but also has a strategic vision of the a market, of the product that they are developing, and how the technology can leverage possible contingencies.
Week 1: An international perspective
- Before I introduce Digital Leadership in China, I would like to say some figures.
- If we could make use of the technology with a related industry, like transportation, like agriculture, and also finance and health care, there will be a huge potential for us to boost our economy.
- The Chinese government actually is a very good example of a digital leader in the current digital economy.
- The government has put the priority of using technology.
- The main idea and purpose is to integrate the internet and digital technology into the traditional industry, for example, energy, agriculture, logistics, and finance, as well as health care and et cetera, more traditional industries, trying to upgrade them by marrying them with the new technologies.
- So the government has been trying to build the ecosystem for the digital innovation across the whole country.
- The first thing they’re trying to do is to lower the barriers of the digital innovation of the products into the market.
- So all of the investment and the capital have already stimulated a lot of innovation, especially digital innovation in China.
- If you go to China, you will see that this technology has penetrated in every single corner of the country.
- So we can say this is how the technology has penetrated to every single part of life of the people and also the working processes in China.
- The digital technology has been used actually like a strategic weapon to use digital technology to boost the economy.
- So you will see the whole country is going digital and the way of working, the way of doing business, is going smarter and this is how digital leadership helps to transform the new way of working, living, and communicating across China.
Week 1 : Global partnership networks
- I’m the director of the Kazakh-British Competitiveness Centre in Kazakhstan.
- What we found in terms of technology- being based in Kazakhstan, living and working there- that increasingly partnership is very, very easy for the technology-based startups.
- Partly originally it was due to cost, because programming costs were so low, and IT is very, very strong in Kazakhstan, as it is in most of the post-Soviet space.
- The value added in Kazakhstan has increased over time.
- They can very, very rapidly get access not only to European markets but also to the Russian language market, which many, many companies are excluded from simply because of language.
- They can also transfer technologies very, very quickly because they’re working with people, as we are with people in Reading.
- So this course will be very, very relevant for them because everything’s changing so fast.
Week 1: Welcome from the team