ABSTRACT
Digital disruption, digital transformation, and digital business demand rapid shifts in an organization’s culture and its execution speed (i.e. speed at which it implements strategies, changes, and plans). Effectively bringing about the required cultural shifts and execution speed requires new or adapted leadership roles and competencies that are conceptualized as digital leadership, and juxtaposed against traditional leadership. As well as being steep achievement challenges, the rapid shifts in culture and execution capability come with significant change risks that leaders have to manage. But, although serious, these change risks are dwarfed by the new risk exposures created by the use of new digital technologies, digital business models, and digital processes. These new and significantly expanded risk exposures demand sophisticated and fast risk management and governance practices. Fortunately, as well as the new risks they create, digital technologies offer a swathe of sophisticated tools that can be leveraged to supercharge the effectiveness of risk management and governance practices. Leveraging of these tools to optimize risk management and governance is what is commonly referred to as digital risk management and digital governance. In this chapter, we introduce accountants to these concepts of digital leadership, accelerated change and transformation, digital risk management, and digital governance (i.e. what are they, how do they differ from their traditional counterpart terms, what is their value proposition, what constitutes best practice for each capability). We then discuss the roles and competencies these organizational capabilities require of accountants.
