Digital Transformation Leadership

Explore concepts and frameworks for how to lead effectively in today's ever-changing world. Using an integrative reflective practice approach, students examine their own approach to leadership and create an initial plan for their own leadership development, as well as the leadership development opportunities for their organization.

To thrive in the modern digital era, organizations must cultivate a culture that embraces innovation, collaboration, and agility. This course offers a comprehensive exploration of digital transformation, which is the process of using digital technologies to create new, or modify existing, business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements. Students will learn how to apply strategies and practices to foster a culture that not only adapts to but also anticipates technological advancements. This course also provides insights into leveraging emerging technologies to maintain a competitive edge.

Throughout history, technology provided opportunities for innovation, resulting in changes in business and society at a global scale. These technologies often disrupted business policies and processes, impacting jobs and organizational structures. Students examine how technological innovation is experienced in society and viewed over time and into the future by business people, philosophers, and sociologists. Students explore the question, How do we imagine that business, society and our place within will be affected as technology continues to advance?

Examine how to cultivate meaningful relationships across an organizational system, from co-workers, to team members, to broader stakeholders. Attention will be given to how to leverage both formal and informal relationships to create positive impact. Topics include perceptions, motivation, emotional intelligence, building teams, and conflict management.

Students use a framework to explore the dynamics of human interaction within and between organizations. Throughout the course, they will use a perspective that a key function of management is to negotiate for resources and use that perspective to develop collaborative relationships with employees, vendors, suppliers, and interested communities.

Explore how to uncover creative insights and innovative solutions for today's organizational challenges. Learn about the systematic process of design thinking from a human-centred approach, including how to cultivate creativity in others and create a culture of innovation.

Students learn to create powerful reporting tools, to forecast data behavior, and to explore its use in business. This class has a hands-on approach, developed in the context of the application of analytics to business, allowing students to develop the skills necessary to create relevant tools for data-driven organizations. All hands-on work assumes the existence of a technology infrastructure, and no prior knowledge on how to install or maintain the software used in the labs is required.

In this course, students explore artificial intelligence (AI) through the lens of enterprise innovation, uncovering how AI is reshaping digital modernization. Students will learn how organizations across sectors are harnessing AI to forge customer relations and enhance process efficiency. Students will also engage with case studies that offer insights and strategies to architect an AI-centric business model tailored to an organization's scale, sector, and data governance strengths.

This course emphasizes a holistic approach to digital transformation by simultaneously addressing an organization's technology resources, business processes, and the outcomes it seeks. The course prepares leaders not just to implement new digital capabilities or streamline processes, but to foster sustained, continuous innovation that meets and anticipates changing customer and market demands. Students will develop a digital transformation strategy that advances enterprise operations, business models, and technology ecosystems, while also enhancing customer and employee interactions with these elements.

This course culminates in an applied leadership capstone project to support the translation, application and synthesis of core concepts from previous courses to a final capstone project, through action research and reflection. The project will reflect a real-life situation and will include a description of the situation, stakeholder mapping, identification of key leadership opportunities and challenges, and conceptual basis for recommendations derived from data collection as well as prior learnings and content from the Leadership Program.