Leading Digital Transformation
Embracing digital technologies for innovation and competitive advantage
View session datesLeading Digital Transformation
About the program
Digital transformation is crucial for organizations to remain competitive and relevant in today's rapidly evolving business landscape. By embracing digital technologies and processes, organizations can streamline operations, enhance efficiency, and improve customer experiences. Digital transformation also enables better data collection and analysis, empowering organizations to make data-driven decisions and innovate more effectively.
However, the degree to which organizations are successful in their digital transformation efforts varies widely. This variation has been linked to the attempt of many executives to embark on digital transformation with traditional logic and assumptions that may have worked well in other transformations, but are incompatible with the demands of digital transformation. While some organizations successfully navigate the complexities of digital transformation and emerge stronger, others struggle due to factors such as resistance to change, legacy systems, and inadequate strategic planning. Success often hinges on an understanding of what effective leadership, change management, innovation management and cultural shift mean in a digital transformation context.
This 2-day program is for all leaders who have prioritized digital transformation as a strategic imperative and want to learn how to lead their organization by making effective decisions, developing talent, and fostering a culture of agility and adaptability to drive desired results. It is unique in that the design of the program is to facilitate conversation and understanding of challenges that sit at the intersection of business and technology leadership.
In this program you will learn to:
- Be more proficient in leveraging technology to drive strategic decision-making and organizational success
- Avoid the hype by learning to evaluate emerging technologies and make informed decisions to guide digital initiatives
- Understand different ways to structure the organization by exploring the difference between digital programs, products, and projects
- Adopt effective governance and execution strategies to ensure digital investments drive desired results
- Navigate the hurdles and challenges of leading digital transformation
- Identify and understand the essence of digital technologies and their interplay with people in a digital transformation context
Available via live, in-person delivery
Attend the program in an immersive, in-person environment at SmithToronto, located in the heart of Toronto's downtown financial district at 200 Front Street West.
Who should attend
This program is designed for both technical and non-technical executives and leaders across all functional areas who are charged with transforming the organization for the digital age. Leaders come together and learn through facilitated conversation and group work. Exploring the intersection between technology and business is essential to learn how digitalization efforts can enhance productivity, minimize waste, improve customer and client experiences, and change the way people work.
Discounts Available
Registered Charities
Queen’s Executive Education is pleased to offer a limited number of discounted seats in every program to employees of Canadian registered charities. Check your eligibility to receive a registered charity discount
Volume Discounts
Queen’s Executive Education is pleased to offer a 15% discount for organizations that pre-pay for five or more seats on any of our programs within a 12-month period. Check your eligibility to receive a volume discount
A Recognized Symbol of Excellence
Participants who complete the program earn the Leading Digital Transformation digital badge credential.
Personal Benefits
- Recognize why digital transformation is unique from other IT and organization transformation initiatives
- Improve your digital literacy to become more confident and proficient in strategic decision making
- Learn different leadership strategies and approaches to ensure digital investments translate into desired results
- Identify common barriers that get in the way of digital transformation and how to navigate them
Organizational Benefits
- Help your organization chart the path towards becoming ‘future ready’
- Identify the skills and competencies required to enable digital transformation
- Avoid the hype by learning to evaluate emerging technologies and make informed decisions to guide digital initiatives
- Learn different ways you can structure the organization to enable digital transformation
- Identify and understand the essence of digital technologies and their interplay with people in a digital transformation context
Program content:
The program aims to highlight how leaders can change the way they think about key transformation pillars (i.e. strategy, leadership, and change) in an environment that is increasingly enabled by data and digital technologies. With both technical and non-technical leaders in the room, the approach to learning focuses on class discussions, exchange of ideas and perspectives with faculty and fellow peers. Participants also have the benefit of using a proprietary assessment tool that quantifies the degree to which their organization is ready for transformation and diagnoses key barriers that might be getting in their way.
Day 1:
Digital X – Leading Digital Transformation
- Unpack “digital” to understand why managing the intersection between technology and business is different and challenging
- Discuss common barriers that get in the way of driving digital transformation
- Explore pathways for leading digital transformation
Exercise: Digital Leadership – Navigating the turns and twists of digital transformation
- Recalibrate your perspective on how to lead digital transformation and be future-ready in an ever-evolving context
- Leading versus managing change in digital transformation contexts
- Avoiding technology fallacy while realizing technology value
Day 2:
Digital Literacy – Executing on the Digital Strategy
- Improve your digital literacy to lead at the intersection of business and technology
- Make better decisions on when to ‘buy’ and when to ‘build’ technology improvements
- Learn ways to structure the organization through an improved understanding of digital programs, products, and projects
- Identify talent gaps and explore strategies for filling them
Exercise: Shift to Digital – Amplifying Tailwinds and Removing Headwinds
- Diagnose your organization’s key enablers and barriers that are impacting digital transformation results
- Explore strategies for amplifying tailwinds and removing headwinds to build capacity, maintain alignment, and set clear priorities to drive the most important work
- Identify personal improvements that will help you be more intentional in leading digital transformation.
In-Person Learning
Learn alongside fellow participants from across the country, discovering best practices that span industries and sectors.
Our in-person programs include classroom learning sessions led by award-winning Smith School of Business professors and industry experts. Practice new skills in breakout sessions, projects and simulations, and apply your learning toward real-world case studies.
SmithToronto
SmithToronto is located on the 30th floor, 200 Front Street West in the heart of Canada's financial centre and is easily accessible by GO, subway and the PATH system.
Smith School of Business delivers many programs and classes at SmithToronto and it is home to the Master of Finance, Master of Management Analytics, and Master of Management in Artificial Intelligence programs. The site includes classrooms, meeting rooms, staff offices, special events spaces, and a variety of multi-media presentation systems.
As well, it includes three Boardroom Learning Centres with fully interactive videoconference capabilities. These rooms are used to deliver classes for Smith’s Executive and Accelerated MBA programs.
Session Leaders
Session leaders include senior professors from Smith School of Business and knowledgeable experts from industry. These outstanding teachers are constantly in touch with today's business world through real-world business experience, Board memberships and their own consulting practices.
A world in which technology enables businesses to prosper, employees to thrive, and a culture for driving results to flourish is the vision behind Kathryn Brohman’s thought leadership in sustainable execution.
An Associate professor at Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, Kathryn has co-authored several books that focus on how today’s organizations can navigate business practices to drive short-term results without compromising long-term success. Her most recent book entitled SHIFT: A New Mindset for Sustainable Execution presents results from her work with over 750+ organizations that helped translate strategy into action. The book provides a pragmatic approach to identifying salient execution barriers, filling gaps to stabilize an execution backbone, and removing distractions to seamlessly adapt to change.
Since arriving at Queen’s University in 2003, Kathryn has pioneered programs in Strategy Execution and Digital Transformation across MBA and executive programs. She has worked with hundreds of organizations in North America to translate strategy into action. Kathryn has received multiple funding grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) as well as the Ontario Research Foundation and published her work in premier journals including MIS Quarterly, Decision Sciences, Harvard Business Review, MIS Quarterly Executive, and Communications of the ACM.
Abayomi Baiyere is an Associate Professor & Distinguished Research Fellow of Digital Technology at Smith School of Business; a Research Affiliate at MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research; and a visiting scholar at the University of Turku. Before joining academia, he worked for companies such as SAP, ABN AMRO (Dialogues Incubator), and as an entrepreneur.
His research looks at digitalization issues from an organizational perspective - with a focus on digital transformation, digital/disruptive innovations as well as digital work. His research takes a design science and qualitative methods orientation, among others. He is currently among scholars leading the charge to chart a path for digital X-themed research in the information systems discipline and beyond.
He currently serves as an associate editor of Information Systems Journal - ISJ and on the editorial board of Information and Organization. He serves (or has served) as a guest editor on special issues in several journals. He currently leads the Digital Disruption and Digital Transformation Special Interest Group of ISPIM, and he leads the “Theory of Digital Theme” in the digitalization department of CBS. He also holds a leadership position in the IFPI 9.1 group. He has served as an executive member of the OCIS (now CTO) division of the Academy of Management (AoM), among other leadership roles.
His work has been accepted in journals such as Information Systems Research (ISR), Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS), Technology Forecasting and Social Change (TFSC), and California Management Review (CMR), among others. Some of his published works have been recognized with awards and nominations in journals such as Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS – best paper honorable mention in 2021), and European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS – best paper in 2020), as well as in conferences such as AoM OCIS division (2020 & 2017); ECIS (2020); MCIS (2018); and ICIS (2017).
Upcoming Sessions
200 Front Street West
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