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.

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Background: Regulatory and competitive pressures and the need for cross-organizational data sharing are demanding that hospital leaders create a data-driven decision making culture to improve performance. Using an innovation assimilation strategy framework, this paper describes how a hospital used its implementation of a Real Time Dashboard System (rtDashboard) to improve performance, change its organizational culture and put it on a path towards digital leadership (DL). Objective: Implement an rtDashboard system that can support a data-driven decision making culture for performance improvement while engaging business and information technology (IT) leaders in DL practice. Results: The rtDashboard contributed significantly to monitoring hospital performance and influenced change in unit level decision making that was aligned with hospital goals. The rtDashboard implementation not only provided substantial performance improvement and quality benchmarking, but also changed the responsibility and accountability culture and helped the hospital put in practice DL principles to support future innovations. Conclusions: DL through rtDashboard is a demonstration of how a hospital can seek and strive for excellence. As much as dashboards are pivotal to organizational performance monitoring at the senior leadership level, the process used to diffuse it to every operational unit in support of a data-driven decision making culture showcases how hospital executives and IT leaders can work together to continually align and re-align their strategies to reach organizational goals -the core of DL practice.