Developing and Managing Digital Organizations

Introduction

Increasingly, organizations are assessing their opportunities, developing and delivering products and services, and interacting with customers and other stakeholders digitally. Mobile computing, social media, and big data are the drivers of the future workplace, and these and other digitally based technologies are having large economic and social impacts, including increased competition and collaboration, the disruption of many industries, and pressure being put on organizations to develop new capabilities and transform their cultures. the digital organization will require its members to have a demanding set of both hard and soft skills. Hard skills include computational thinking and trans-disciplinarity. Soft skills include social intelligence, cross-cultural competency, and the ability to collaborate. To capitalize on these skills, the digital organization must provide flexible workspaces and policies that motivate millennials and enable them to be productive. Such workspaces will include appropriate collaboration tools and be designed according to sound psychological theories and principles. Digital organizations need technologically aware and adept leaders who can set the digital agenda and create the context for the digitization of every relevant aspect of their organizations. Digitization is occurring at an accelerating pace; successful leaders need to synchronize their organizations to digital clock speed.

Course content

Machine Learning for Executive Decisions
Digitalization creates high speed, high volume digital activity traces – Big Data. Using recent advances in machine learning, organizations can use these data to automatically build models that predict specific events in real-time. Managers can use machine learning-based analytics to improve a wide variety of tasks ranging from targeted marketing to preventative maintenance to fraud detection. The course emphasizes processes for approaching and defining problems assessable through machine learning. Participants will engage in hands-on experience with cutting-edge analytics processes, tools, and techniques. Participants will gain insight into how big data analytics can improve business processes and decision-making.

Digital Marketing
Marketing is a key capability in developing a sustainable strategy in the digital age. The need for specialization in the various communication channels increases at the same time as the need for coordination and direction becomes even more important. With digitization of the customer journey and marketing communication, analytics and marketing intelligence becomes the hub

that coordinates and directs all marketing activities. In the program, we will discuss how companies will change how they manage growth and profitability of their portfolio of their customers.

Organizing and Leading Digitally
Participants will learn about the demands facing leadership roles in a digital work environment. Leadership will be presented as a cognitive process, outlining how digital technologies have and will blend into the traditional ways that leadership has been conceived. These developments will have consequences for internal processes such as the ways we organise, and the way leaders understand their roles. Participants will learn about how the traditional role of leadership needs to adapt to the changing nature of work in the digital age, how leadership relates to entrepreneurship and innovation, and how digital technologies, as a value-creating resource, may affect leadership.

Design Thinking for Digital Development
Digital development requires new design methods. This module, provided at a partner institution in Europe, provides participants with an intense introduction to Design Thinking and the experience of hands-on team-based solution development within short time-frames. Teams will run through the complete Design Thinking process, working on a real-life project and coming up with solutions to an actual problem – including user research and testing. Participants will also visit companies running cutting-edge digital Design Thinking initiatives. Upon completing this module, participants will be able to apply Design Thinking to digital development efforts as well as run dynamic strategy processes.

Digital Business Models
Digitization changes the business models by which companies create value for their customers and their owners. Established companies use digital technologies to help them operate their businesses with greater speed and lower costs and, in many cases, offer their customers opportunities to co-design and co-produce products and services. Many start-up companies use digital technologies to develop new products, services, and business models that disrupt the present way of doing business. Examples include sharing services, crowd sourcing and crowd funding services. Other products and services that are fully or partially digital include news and entertainment, as well as advanced AI based diagnostic and problem-solving services. In this course, participants will learn how to use digital technologies to transform established businesses and how to understand, develop and strategically manage the recent types of businesses that arise from digital technologies.