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Eleadership blur

The Digital Leadership Forum at Henley

The Digital Leadership Forum (DLF) is a collaborative platform set up by Henley Business School, part of the University of Reading.

Through the Digital Leadership Forum (DLF), the Business School and its partners engage in research projects, networking, teaching, design and transferring policy-relevant research in the field of digital leadership.

At the Digital Leadership Forum, we are dedicated to promoting innovations in ICT and exploring how digital technologies facilitate the way we work and communicate, now and in the future.

Digital leadership is required to drive the business model innovation afforded by digital technologies, such as social media, mobility, analytics, cloud computing and the Internet of Things (SMACI). It requires agility, adaptability and speed. The Digital Leadership Forum aims at exchanging opinions on and co-creating solutions to the skills issues needed to lead a modern firm, utilising key enabling technologies.

Digital leaders are those who have the business, technology and personal competencies to exploit their digital ecosystem. However, recent research from the European Commission has found that there is a significant shortage of digital leaders.

Through the Digital Leadership Forum, we welcome the opportunity to address this skills gap with industry partners, such as businesses and public sector organisations.

For more information, please contact Dr Weizi (Vicky) Li, weizi.li@henley.ac.uk

News

Strategy & Enterprise Architecture (SEA) Programme

The Strategy & Enterprise Architecture (SEA) Programme evaluates the challenges from the viewpoint of key stakeholders. It addresses how to develop a winning enterprise model through understanding the business strategy and enhancing the ability to design agile business and IT processes for long lasting and high performance.

The SEA Programme is the result of a highly interactive and demand-driven design. It has been developed by leading business schools under the sponsorship of the European CIO Association (EuroCIO). It delivers both on the techniques and management of strategy and on enterprise architecture.

Please find detailed SEA programme information at https://www.henley.ac.uk/executive-education/course/strategy-and-enterprise-architecture-programme

Henley and McKinsey

Henley and McKinsey & Company have formed a research collaboration to identify evidence for the impact of Enterprise Architecture on digital transformations.

Attached is an article from the Journal of Enterprise Architecture that introduces the EA Survey.

We invite all CIOs, Heads of EA and business leaders to engage in completing the survey which aims to create a dataset from companies across all industries. Survey can be found at http://hly.ac/EA-survey. Our goal is to raise the capability and profile of Enterprise Architects worldwide. All individual data is confidential.

Free course helps management make the most of digital leadersihp and creat value through technology

In a world of ever-changing digital technology, Henley Business School and the University of Reading are set to launch an innovative digital leadership MOOC (massive open online course), starting on the Future Learn platform on Monday 8 February 2016. The four-week 'Digital leadership: Creating value through technology' course is free to join, aimed at top and middle management in any industry, and will help participants to gain confidence in digital leadership and create value through technology.

For further information, and to register for the MOOC, visit the course page.

First UK Arm of Innovative Information and Communications Technology Academy Launched to Support Industry Talent Nurturing

Henley Business School, the University of Reading and Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, have today launched the first UK arm of the internationally established HAINA (Huawei Authorized Information Network Academy). The partnership will combine industry and academic expertise to help enhance the skills and career prospects of students and industry professionals, through Huawei certification courses.

Research

Over time, the Digital Leadership Forum aims to be the leading network organisation for generating and transferring policy-relevant research in the field of digital leadership and technology-enabled decision-making.

The Digital Leadership Forum has been initiated by Henley Business School and builds on its research and teaching heritage in innovative ICT and leadership for business advantage. More recently, the Business School has contributed to two European e-leadership projects: GUIDE and LEAD. These are a follow-up to the European Commission’s communication, e-Skills for the 21st Century, which presented the EU’s long-term e-skills agenda; the Digital Agenda for Europe initiative; and the communication, Towards a Job-rich Recovery.

The GUIDE project was launched as a result of the 2013 European conference ‘e-Leadership: Skills for Competitiveness and Innovation’, which focused on identifying the needs of Europe in terms of high-level skills for the global digital economy by 2020. The target group was large enterprises. As a core member of the task force, Henley developed the e-Leadership Curriculum Profile for Business and Enterprise Architecture, based on its successful collaboration with EuroCIO, Technische Universität München (TUM) and TIAS School for Business and Society in an international professional education programme. This led to a series of European e-leadership events, with Henley running the UK event attended by 100 stakeholders.

The LEAD project, e-Leadership Skills for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises, was launched by the European Commission Directorate-General Enterprise and Industry (DG-ENTR) in January 2014 with a consortium led by empirica. The aim was to develop targeted actions for start-ups and fast-growing SMEs to provide them with relevant e-leadership skills and qualifications for entrepreneurs, managers and advanced ICT users that are internationally recognised. Henley was a core research partner in the project, which lead to both research and education outputs, described in Events and Resources sections.

Research articles:

  • E-leadership through strategic alignment: an empirical study of small and medium sized enterprises in the digital age. Journal of Information Technology (to be published in 2016)
  • E-leadership in Organisations - Facilitating IT-business Alignment for Innovation and High-growth. European Conference on Information Systems. ECIS 2015.

More research resource can be found at "Resource" section.

Teaching

The digital leadership team at Henley aims to provide teaching and training to fill the e-skills gap in the digital economy. Details of our programmes can be found at:

Executive education

Massive Open Online Course

MBA

  • MWM020-Entrepreneurship

MSc courses

Undergraduate courses

  • MM260: Innovation and Market entry

Media and articles

Articles about the work of the digital leadership team at Henley can be found at:

e-Leadership in practice www.computing.co.uk/ctg/opinion/2393100/e-leadership-in-practice

Developing e-leaders – how can education help? www.computing.co.uk/ctg/opinion/2374325/developing-e-leaders-how-can-education-help

The importance of e-leadership in meeting digital challenges www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-importance-of-e-leadership-in-meeting-digital-challenges

Events

Digital leadership events have been held across Europe. Details of past and upcoming events can be found at:

Developing e-Leadership – The Skills Agenda http://eskills-guide.eu/events/united-kingdom/

European e-Skills 2014 Conference http://eskills2014conference.eu/conference/

European Conference on Digital and Key Enabling Technologies Skills: Enhancing Skills for Competitiveness, Growth and Jobs www.leadership2015.eu/conference/

Are You Digital and IT Ready? Effective e-Leadership for High-Performance SMEs www.henley.ac.uk/events/are-you-digital-and-it-ready-effective-e-leadership-for-high-performance-smes

Resources

Digital leadership projects:

European Commission updates on ICT and e-skills

Funding Opportunities

Seminar and Networking Platform

Digital leadership team at Henley aims to build up both online platform and offline networking opportunities for all stakeholders in the digital leadership field.

Digtal leadership team at Henley organises seminars to provide idea sharing and networking opportunities for stakeholders in the digital leadership field. Click to find more details.