The Way of the Digital Leader

What Makes a Digital Leader Great? For many years now it has been clear that other C Suite and senior managers have been increasingly impatient with the efforts of the Information Function to deliver innovation. At the same time it is vitally important to deliver existing services robustly and drive down costs as globalisation and digital delivery increase competition and customer expectations.

In parallel there has been long been a strong movement to "Manage IT as a Business-within-a-Business" or what I call "The Business of IT" (TBIT). Recently this has morphed into a trend for describing the CIO's role as being the CEO of IT. This is important as one of the key roles of a CEO is to think and act in the 3 functional dimensions of his organisation: Control the Business, Do the Business and Support the Business. This is key to building an integrated senior management team which acts coherently with the same unity of purpose. Failure to achieve cohesion will undermine the success of any investment in IT systems, as the business will fail to exploit the potential value.

At the same time there are initiatives such the TBM Council's work on developing "Technology Business Management". This focuses on the conversations that the Information Function must have with other parts of its Business. Key to this is agreeing upon and demonstrating value and cost with transparency.

However for TBIT to be successful, the "Right Value" needs to be identified. Whilst the CIO cannot do this on his/her own, the CIO needs to be stongly plugged into the Business and its Market. Understanding of how the Business Operates, its strengths and weaknesses and the issues that it faces is a start. Understanding the trends within the market place and positioning of key competitors is another milestone. But overall, there needs to be understanding of the customer's needs, desires, frustrations and experience, as well as anticipation of how they may change. Lastly, there needs to be empathy which identifies who else deals with your customers, in a non competitive but complementary manner, and how they could collaborate with you to deliver more.

One more plank is widening the sources of innovation to exploit capability and knowledge that existing partners can bring to the Business and networking with other sources of ideas, e.g. former colleagues from the Business, analysts and academic thinkers.

If I put this together, the answer to the question may include a leader who:

- has good social skills (or at least works on them) and networks with key internal and external stakeholders,

- looks outward and understands the "big rules of the market place",

- builds an effective team which can deliver and gets on well with each other,

- works well with the rest of the C Suite and their teams,

- is lucky enough to work in a business with a healthy collaborative culture.

So just as digital enterprises are moving to understand each customer's individual needs better and make customer interaction more human, the digital leader needs to focus on empathy for success.