Hospital Leadership in Support of Digital Transformation

Evolving customer expectations and the rapid introduction of new information technologies are influencing business operations, and businesses need to transform themselves with new operating models to remain competitive. The traditional top-down administrative leadership approach is not sufficiently flexible to support the innovation needed to sustain customer engagement and retention. There is a need for both an enabling leadership that supports the exploration of innovative ideas quickly for viability and an adaptive leadership to transition the ideas that show promise into the current business model or a variation of this model to sustain growth. We define digital leadership as a strategic process that collectively uses these three leadership styles to create an ecosystem that advances a culture of innovation within organizations. This leadership process uses four foundational platforms to support business transformations: (1) An innovation platform to empower teams to explore ideas that create value using digital transformations; (2) An agile system and business platform to quickly design and deliver IT implementations; (3) A learning platform to support reflective discourse that leads to organizational capacity building; and (4) An adoption platform to decide when and what implementations get transitioned to the regular business for sustaining competitiveness. We will illustrate how digital leadership is used to transform the culture of a community hospital through several IS implementations recognized by external peers for their innovativeness.