Digitisation has been a core issue at companies around the globe for more than two decades. Whats different today is the fact that new digital technologies and media, along with changing consumer demand, are driving comprehensive changes in the way businesses operate. This process is known as digital transformation, and professionals and organisations are increasingly looking for executive education programmes that can help them prepare for and successfully manage it.
The creative sectorincluding publishing, television, film, music and gamingis one of the clearest cases in point when it comes to industries affected by digitisation. In fact, a 2015 Strategy& report attributed all recent growth in the creative industries to digital phenomena. According to the report, between 2003 and 2013, non-digital revenue sank by 14 billion but was far offset by digital revenue increasing by more than double that amount.
That is one example. Digitization is impacting almost every industry imaginable, creating a pressing issue at large companies that are more rooted in analog traditions and models, such as bankingan issue discussed in our previous post on the finance industry. The fact that there are more than 100 courses related to digitisation in our Executive Education Navigator underscores the growing demand for guidance and expertise in this area.
Two Core Directions in Digital Transformation
Digital transformation means different things for different companies, says Josep Valor-Sabatier, professor of information systems and information technology at IESE Business School. On the one hand, it applies to outward-facing communications and customer relations. This is not just a matter of having a Facebook page. Digital and social media are not just channels, they are ways of thinking that require deep transformation and becoming more customer-centric.
Examples of courses in which executives can cultivate their digital communications awareness and responsiveness include:
- Communication and Persuasion in the Digital Age at MITs Sloan School of Management
- Competing in a Data-Driven World at Ashridge Business School
Besides elevating the customer experience, the other simultaneous and symbiotic force within digital transformation involves enabling employees to work smarter internally. Professor Valor-Sabatier continues: Digitisation also applies to the technologies companies can leverage to manage their own employees — for encouraging internal innovation, improving management decisions, maintaining processes and procedures, detecting talent and giving employees a sense of belonging, even if they are not all working in the same location.
Programmes relevant to internal processes affected by digitisation include:
- Systematic Innovation of Products, Processes, and Services at MITs Sloan School of Management
- Business Architecture and Strategic Business Process Management at Penn States Smeal College of Business
Mastering the Digitisation Mindset
For senior executives, including CEOs and Chief Information Officers (CIOs), more important than any one element of digitisation is learning to adapt ones overall mindset as a leader in order to cope with and promote digital transformation across an entire company. Executive-education courses taking this big-picture approach usually last multiple days at minimum. Such courses enable participants to bring their unique individual challenges and cases to the classroom and to explore novel, potentially disruptive, business models.
A sample of such courses:
- Leading Digital Business Transformation at IMD Business School
- Digital Mindset: How to Innovate Your Business for the Future at IESE
- Revitalizing Your Digital Business Model at MITs Sloan
- Digital Transformation Lab at IE Business School
- Digital Business Strategy at Columbia Business School
This is but a small selection of the numerous, diverse executive-education programmes related to digital transformation. But thanks to those very digital technologies, its easier than ever to search online for the programme thats the best fit for you and your business context.
