A Digital Transformation Journey Facilitated by Columbia Business School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I was recently accepted into the Columbia Business School & Massachusetts Institute of Technology joint Executive Education Post Graduate Diploma in Digital Business.The Postgraduate Diploma in Digital Business is aimed to help design strategies and evaluate business models that help grow business in this thriving age of digitalization.

I am currently 7 weeks into the curriculum. My intent moving forward is to both share some highlights of what I’ve learned over the next year’s journey and to also leverage those learnings on the job in collaboration with my colleagues.

The first module is around the five domains of digital transformation — a holistic framework.

One of the great tools throughout this program is a self-assessment, I would highly encourage you to take this self-assessment: are you ready for digital transformation?

Even extremely successful companies built in the pre-digital age struggle to adapt their strategic thinking in order to thrive and grow in the digital age. This self-assessment tool is designed to assess the readiness of your own business or organization for digital transformation.

For each pair of statements, reflect on the current state of your own business. Choose the number, on the scale from 1 to 7, that reflects where your organization stands in relation to the two statements: 1 indicates fully aligned with the left, 7 with the right.

The first group of questions relates to the strategic concepts presented in this book. These questions are designed to measure the degree to which your organization has adapted its strategic thinking to the digital reality. The second group of questions relates to organizational agility. These questions are designed to measure your organization’s ability to put into practice these new strategic principles and successfully drive change in your business.

After completing the self-assessment, look back at your results. Those areas with a score on the left (e.g., 1–3) are where change is most needed. You can use this diagnostic tool to focus your leadership attention and efforts as you guide your own organization into the future.

Some quotes that intrigued me are as follows:

“We had a recent symposium on this topic looking at the digital economy and trying to understand the economics of it at Columbia University, and one of our business school faculty, Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize winning economist, was one of the panelists, and he raised this point that it’s very hard, as an economist, to sort of try to break out and say, well, let’s measure the growth or the shape or the size of the digital part of the economy, because really every business and every sector is becoming digitized, is being driven by and transformed by the impact of new digital business models, new approaches to creating value, to reaching markets, so really every industry and every business today has a digital future.”

“Digital strategy is really more about an organizational leadership mindset. It’s more about understanding what’s going on very broadly in the market, understanding how the world is changing and what the different strategic opportunities are that are available to you and your industry, that may not have been possible, even just a year ago.”

I am excited to go on this journey and delighted to share some of the thought leadership. Moving forward I will be including some questions for thought along with some of the key concepts and frameworks.