Leading in a digital world

{{DigitalResource The focus is on theory, sharing, case studies and networking, and I'm starting to learn some stuff I didn't know before. Here are my top five take-aways from an environmental wildlife charity perspective on leading in a digital world:
 * Type=Project output, Blog
 * Resource=Leading in a digital world - blog by Ruchir Shah, Director of External Affairs, Scottish Wildlife Trust.
 * Link=https://digitalacademy.gov.scot/
 * Description=Leading in a digital world is a Scottish Government initiative to build capacity for digital transformation leadership in Scotland.
 * Image=https://res.cloudinary.com/ruchirlives/image/upload/c_scale,h_627,w_1200/v1612135712/Planets.jpg
 * Blogimage=https://res.cloudinary.com/ruchirlives/image/upload/c_scale,h_627,w_1200/v1612135712/Planets.jpg
 * Blog=This year I participated in a Scottish Government initiative to build capacity for digital transformation leadership in Scotland. It's a series of conferences and events online and in-person led by the Scottish Digital Academy with ministerial support.

Top 5 take-aways
1. Innovation Innovation, trying and developing new stuff, is simply a route to transforming services digitally or otherwise. However, when talking about digital transformation, far too many people think it's about technological innovation. It is partly, but it's also much more about social innovation, culture innovation and design innovation.

2. Collaboration All 'transformers' are beginning to understand the value of a collaborative rather than competitive economy. It's important to foster collaboration whether that's termed 'collective leadership', 'polycentric governance systems', or 'open source governance'.

3. Strategy Scottish Government's new digital strategy is going to become less shiny and much more practical and foundational. Their focus is on a 'components' approach, where government pulls together a service catalogue of pre-configured components that can be bolted on or bootstrapped into a bigger design. As long as this doesn't simply shift from 'we can't do this cause we haven't done this before' to, 'we can't include this, because we haven't included it before', it should be a step forward.

4. Leadership So you're leading a digital transformation initiative, when does it end? There's still a focus for many of our public sector partners on big end-points, when the jobs done and everyone can move into a low-mode maintenance cycle. But does that ever happen? Or is the service out of date before it even reaches the end-user? On the other hand, 'continuous improvement' is rarely motivating. The best transformations are the speedier and more flexible ones.

5. Carbon impact There is an important movement to highlight the carbon impact of digital technologies. Datacentres that store and facilitate data for digital use and digital infrastructure contribute around 4% of all emissions output. Digital has the potential to leverage in bigger carbon reductions elsewhere, but we need to build in assessments of our digital carbon impact and minimise these where possible.

Ruchir Shah Director of External Affairs Scottish Wildlife Trust }}