Organizations today face challenges like changing organizational structures and value chains, participation in digital eco-systems or fast changing customer expectations. Digital Leadership aims to guide the necessary transformation to overcome these challenges. Thereby a holistic viewpoint is needed since the challenges and conditions concern organizations as a whole. They are not limited to single managers, departments or even the organization’s system boundaries. Digital Leadership is a relatively new and well discussed research topic but yet only vaguely defined and understood. This exploratory research contributes to the exploration, understanding and development of Digital Leadership with the elaboration, based on the review of existing literature, of a holistic definition of Digital Leadership, and the proposal, based on semi-structured qualitative expert interviews, of 20 interdependent and mutually influencing Digital Leadership factors within four main areas of Digital Leadership. These 20 factors are relevant for successful and sustainable holistic Digital Leadership and offer a deeper understanding of Digital Leadership. Furthermore, they provide guidance for the implementation and improvement of Digital Leadership for organizations facing the challenges and conditions of the digital age.

The digital age poses manifold challenges and difficult conditions for all sizes of organizations in all industries. Organizations need to adapt to complex challenges and difficult conditions and to plan and execute their digital transformation strategies. More and more organizations need support by strategic business consulting companies which must be offered in an effective and efficient way so that also small and medium sized companies can profit from it to stay competitive. Our research work focusses on the development of online strategic consulting tools offered as self-services on a web-based platform supporting the definition of digital transformation strategy. The so-called Digital Backpack Assessment (DBA) measures the digital maturity and proposes possible cases for changes. The tool follows the following principles: (1) A holistic approach with focus on the customer orientation, the business models, the organizational excellence, and the operational excellence. (2) An open strategy approach where several stakeholders from the company participate.

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