**4. Conclusions**

The pace of change has increased since the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the rapid introduction of advanced information technologies (e.g. Internet/Web, mobile devices, wireless communication, and Internet of Things (IoT), among others) that enabled businesses to bring customer purchasing decision-making into the business value chain. To track customer experiences and address their evolving purchasing behaviors, many new companies have entered the marketplace, with some dis-intermediating brick-and-mortar companies and others acting as intermediaries of information aggregation and analysis. The net result of all these marketplace changes, in less than two decades, has made competing effectively quite complex.

Organizations in general are now forced to operate at two different speeds to address this complex market dynamic. The faster speed is to explore new opportunities and address threats posed by advanced digitization to their current business using innovative new products/services, and the regular speed is to continue to run the current business and adapt it to changes brought about from new products/service explorations to sustain growth. Digital leadership is an "enabling" leadership that supports continual exploration within an organization to create value for customers using advanced digitization. The digitization efforts start with a focus on creating value for customers ("customer centric") using a service lens (i.e. how does digitization lead to improved services for the customer?). These digital services are then quickly designed to help improve customer interaction, engagement, and experience, and brought into the market to create value. Such a digital leadership methodology needs a close partnership of both IT and business leaders, each driven by the customer's needs and expectations.
