The Digital MBA

What Drives Organisations?

What’s at the core of organisational culture and how does the structure, agility and politics of different organisations affect your ability to make an impact in a senior technology role?

Commercial Strategy

You can’t build and deliver a technology strategy without understanding what drives the wider commercial strategy. 

We talk with CEOs and business leaders to explore the core principles and frameworks that drive effective strategy and value into an organization, and how that shapes technology and product development.

Legals and Compliance

We are joined by legal and compliance experts who explain not only the core concepts but also potential alarm bells you need to be aware of when dealing with such a wide range of stakeholders.

Marketing & Sales

With increasing crossover taking place between marketing, sales and technology, it’s important to understand the core marketing demands, drivers and metrics.

Equally important for the high impact technology leader is to be very close to sales and by extension the customer. 

HR

Whether hiring in hypergrowth or managing a delicate team relationship, you need to understand core principles about how your organisation attracts, retains and conducts best HR practice.

Alignment

Where does technology drive strategic competitive advantage?

We work through the factors and frameworks that enable you to align your tech strategy with wider business goals and how you need to bring together different elements of an organisation for buy-in?

Value Drivers

Every area of a business should be adding value but we look specifically at how/where you can audit, review and validate the value being driven by technology.

What are you auditing to ensure costs are controlled?
Where is your IP value being created and protected?
How are you capturing market validation? 

Planning

Once you understand strategy and value drivers, how do you set up your team for success? What does a roadmap need to contain and how do you communicate the plan to a non-technical audience?

Execution

Our expert lecturers introduce you to the best practice tools, frameworks and methodologies needed to help track and execute successful roadmaps?

We also look at the different solutions available to help save cost, negotiate blockages and accelerate you towards delivering a well executed strategy.

Mindset and Values

We work through a range of lectures and exercises that will enable you to understand more about your own values and how you can negotiate any barriers to success. 

Enhancing Your Skills

From public speaking to growth mindset to engaging with your conscious and unconscious mind, there are skills and methodologies you can adopt and adapt that will help you improve your performance and impact. 

Build Your Personal Brand

Having understood your values and focused on building your skills, now we look at how to raise your profile (and value) in the marketplace.

We talk with experts on thought leadership, networking and personal branding about where you should be focusing your time and resources to achieve the career and impact you want.

Preparation

No point in starting to build a product if the vision, processes and systems are not in place. 

We explore what makes for good preparation, where it impacts on a smoother build and how you need to create an environment that enables build teams to solve product problems faster.

Building

These lectures explore some “build critical” questions around architecture, customer experience and protecting your IP.

Do you have a process in place to iterate quickly?
How are you managing the code?
Do you have the right engineers in the right roles?

Delivery

We all know that the speed of delivery has changed dramatically over the last few years so how do you keep up to date with the systems available to support your tech teams.

These lectures look at the strategies, techniques and tools that will enable your teams to exceed expectations.

Cyber Security

Security must be front and center for anyone in charge of information so we walk through the key considerations for protecting an organisation and the various options that will enable you to better manage the increasing range of macro risks.

Compliance

Compliance helps instill professionalism and understanding across the company as well as make product sales easier and in some cases you can’t sell without compliance certification.

Our lecturers will help you understand in detail what is involved and both the time and resources needed to achieve the compliance required. 

Governance

Good governance, particularly around data, is becoming increasingly important as the effects of legislation like GDPR and CCA become known and stakeholders both internal and external, expect it to be at the core of your organisation.

We unpack what is required and expected, particularly during this era of work from home (WFH) and bring your own device (BYOD).

Management

At the core of information security is knowing when something has gone wrong and being able to do a forensic analysis. 

We look at the logging and reporting systems you need in place and how to fit these into a growing or changing organisation with stakeholder pushback.

Foundation Finance

We explore how companies record and organize their financial transactions, with guest speakers, examples of financial modelling and business case studies.

Planning & Budgeting

Then we apply this to technology budgets and the key factors and challenges when forecasting and building a plan, sometimes in competition with other departments.

Funding Options

Tech leaders should be at the heart of any significant funding particularly as it’s often issues around technology that drive or block the round. We unpack the funding process including common valuation methodologies. 

Relationships & Communication

Often overlooked is the management of key financial relationships, so we arm you with insight on various stakeholder relationships including the CFO, Board, Investors, Private Equity.

Data

Managing, leveraging and organising data is business critical but research indicates up to 80% of a data scientist's time is spent sorting out the data before they can start the work. You will explore how data drives effective decision making and the tools and methodologies that will help you streamline this process.

Reporting

Reporting is not generally a high priority for developers so making sure their reports provide actionable insight is key to efficiency. Consolidating the reporting system, prevents death by a thousand dashboards!

Analytics

Most techniques used by data scientists are not new but what’s created this field in recent years has been the compute ability the cloud has given them. 

From start-up to international enterprise, there is a level playing field and you need to understand what can be achieved with data science, why is it such a hot area and where can it help your business?

discover how data can drive effective decision-making, through case studies from industries such as advertising, retail, and healthcare. You will see examples of techniques like A/B testing, network analysis, and pre/post testing being employed to deliver business outcomes and learn to identify opportunities for action in your own business.

Data as an Asset

This module will dive deeper into data by covering the three main categories of analytics–descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. You will identify the opportunities and limitations of data integration. You will learn concepts like data sourcing, data architecture and storage, and data analytics, which come together to form a holistic data strategy for your organization.

Understanding and Driving Innovation

How do you instill innovation into your team (and organization) as we walk through a detailed analysis of topics such as digital transformation, improvement methodologies and making sense of open source.

Subject Matter Experts … Talk About The Next Big Thing(s)

What does the future look like?

We introduce a range of Subject Matter Experts to deliver a series of lectures and talks aimed at helping you keep in step with what’s coming over the horizon and one step ahead of your competition.