NIIT announces initiatives to drive Digital Leadership

NIIT Limited, providers for skills and talent development, recently announced their intention to be the leader in digital training and development for leaders and their organizations in India, China and Emerging Markets such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and Nigeria, as companies and their leaders struggled to survive and grow in today’s network and platform centric world dominated by new-age companies who act as disruptors in the information age.

With a strong focus on becoming the leader in the digital learning world and to further accelerate NIIT’s own growth and profitability, the company has charted a two-pronged business strategy:

• First, an internal initiative addressing the digital transformation of its entire business to drive growth, value and profitability; and
• Second, an external initiative focusing on training and consulting of individual and corporate customers to enable them to succeed in the digital world

To this end, NIIT has entered into an exclusive partnership with US based OpenMatters LLC, the leader in Business Model Science. Under this partnership, NIIT will bring the content and expertise developed by OpenMatters for Wharton’s SEI Center, Knowledge@Wharton, and Harvard Business Review (HBR) to the India, China and Emerging Markets to address the leadership and management needs of the CXO/VP/Middle Management community.

In a related move, NIIT has appointed Barry Libert, CEO of OpenMatters as the digital advisor to the NIIT Board. Barry Libert, is a senior fellow at the Wharton School and an author and columnist at HBR, K@W, Forbes and the WSJ. As an expert in digital leadership and business model transformation, Barry has co-authored numerous books, articles, training materials, workbooks and faculty guides. Barry leads a team of experts who are continuously researching digital leadership and business’ that use machine learning and advanced text mining while exploring the underlying drivers of value and growth in the age of platforms and networks.

NIIT’s current digital transformation initiatives StackRoute and DigiNxt focus on digital innovator training and digital developer training respectively. Now this new relationship with Barry Libert and OpenMatters will expand its digital offerings - Digital to Leaders, and allow NIIT to address the end to end needs of organizations and governments seeking to re-skill their entire workforce from CXOs to frontline workers to succeed in the digital age.

Speaking on this significant development Rahul Patwardhan, CEO, NIIT, said, “This two tiered partnership is in line with our strategy to play a leadership role in the Digital Learning World, leveraging the exciting new age Digital Technologies that are impacting every industry and every company and their business. First, we are delighted to have Barry Libert as a Digital board Advisor, whose valuable advice will help us build and execute a digital transformation roadmap for companies in India, China and Emerging Markets and our own company; and second, we are going to leverage the training materials developed for Wharton and HBR in the India, China and Emerging Markets”

Speaking on his appointment as a Digital Transformation Advisor to the NIIT Board, Barry Libert, said, “This is indeed an exciting role that will allow us to offer our insights and advice to NIIT in order to partner with NIIT to help leaders throughout India, China and Emerging Markets drive their digital transformation agenda starting with leadership transformation and ending with more valuable business .”

According to the MIT Centre for Digital Business, 77 percent of organizations consider missing digital skills as the key hurdle to their transformation strategy. Therefore, Indian & Global IT Companies are investing heavily in building digital transformation skills to enable their clients transform digitally.