Thought Leadership From Industry Peers

Digital Leadership – Develop strategies to drive business value through innovation

Ashin Antony Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Ignitho Technologies
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What is the winning formula in today’s digital economy? How do enterprises deal with digital disruption and ever-changing business models?

As the business world relies heavily on digital technologies, digital leaders are in high demand. These digital leaders are tech savvy, understand the potential of data and are an inspiration to the teams they lead and people they work with. They explore new areas of technology fearlessly, experimenting rapidly, to create digital transformation and profitable business outcomes.

A Digital Leader should be able to:

  • Develop strategies to drive and transform a business in the digital economy
  • Drive business value through innovation and experimentation
  • Inspire, motivate and manage people and teams that can deliver digital innovation to customers

Changing times call for visionary leaders who can look forward and envisage how a market will evolve – spotting the opportunities and avoiding the threats.

Leadership and management

Good managers are task driven and excellent at getting the best from a team. Leaders are the guiding lights, inspiring loyalty and creativity in their team and promoting the output of the team to the business. Good leaders aren’t necessarily good managers, digital transformation requires both.

Leadership is a choice, not a rank. Leaders will make their employees feel safe. Check out the video from TED Talks:

 

Making an effective change in a timely manner is tough: move too soon and you could be out ahead of the market with no customers. Move too slowly and your existing customers flee to smarter competitors. Added to this, many companies will still be caught out by underestimating the scale, complexity and challenges of change.

Role of a leader in empowering the team

Digital transformations come about when a team has a set of “lighthouse goals” that can shine a clear beam to guide people to their destination. Lighthouse goals enable people in teams to be clear about what they are striving to achieve.

Another vital role of the leader is to create the conditions for fast and sweeping innovation. In most scenarios companies or leaders are not able to provide the correct environment for innovation and are a major reason why companies fail to adapt to market changes. There are many reasons for this – hubris, complacency, bureaucracy, short?term investment horizons, inadequate skills, and resources are few of them.

The hallmark of successful digital players in today’s digital age is their leader’s clarity of their vision and the excellence of execution. The key aspect in this digital age is to be the first one to do things and do it in the best way possible.

Leadership; the ultimate need to drive new ideas

People who lead successful innovation have an open mind towards others, their ideas and creativity can have a profound impact on an individual contributor, their team and the organization by fostering co-creativity. By developing a sense of empowerment and accountability within the team and building confidence in the team’s ability this allows the team to build strong working relationships and trust across the organization.

Digital leaders know that they can’t know everything. They curate a community of experts, users, and SMEs. A group of experts with decades of experience in their respective domains makes the process a lot easier. Ignitho’s expert ecosystem is aimed at helping these digital leaders through well-versed methodologies like Frugal Technology Innovation and Rapid Prototyping to build scalable solutions. These experts, when led by the right person, can be an unstoppable force in driving strategy, building culture, making a change and enhancing the financial performance of the company.

If you are an aspiring leader who is keen to step into the journey of digital leadership, the next blog in this series on sensing the insights on the scope of an innovation is the perfect option for you!

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Ashin Antony Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Ignitho Technologies
Ashin brings to Ignitho two decades of technology leadership experience and was with Mindtree for close to a decade playing key tech leadership roles. His areas of specialization include Big Data, Cloud and Emerging Technologies; with expertise in designing and implementing digital enterprise solutions. Ashin is driving Ignitho’s Data, Cloud and Digital Engineering areas. He is also a business partner and is part of the core leadership team at Nuivio Ventures, Ignitho’s parent company.
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