The program will provide insight into what the digital economy means and how to address the challenges and leverage the opportunities the digital transformation offers. The speakers are well-known thought leaders from academia as well as business. While the openSAP platform empowers learning and promotes adoption of new ideas, the openSAP thought leaders series helps businesses become more adaptable to better serve their customers.

“The digital transformation is not a onetime effort with a clearly defined final target state, but rather a journey. New business practices are emerging every day,” said Dr. Bernd Welz; executive vice president and global head; Scale, Enablement, and Transformation; SAP. “The openSAP thought leaders series provided through the openSAP platform serves as a forum for discussion, learning and sharing of best practices and insights relevant for many businesses.”

The first course of the openSAP thought leaders series, “Leadership in Digital Transformation,” will be led by Professor Dr. Helmut Krcmar of Technische Universität München, Germany, beginning Oct. 6, 2015. During this free, two-week course, participants will learn what it means to be a modern digital business. They will also find out how the organizational and technological changes associated with digital transformation change the role, skills and concept of leadership.

“Envisioning and implementing a truly digital strategy implies overcoming the separation of minds, roles and structures between business and IT,” said Prof. Dr. Krcmar, chair of computer science in economics, Department of Informatics, Technische Universität München. “With this open online course on leadership in digital transformation, I want to create awareness for this issue and stimulate dialog between corporate business and IT leaders. As openSAP brings together professionals from both sides, it is a great platform to convey this message.”

openSAP, the open online learning platform from SAP that hosts massive open online courses (MOOCs), serves as the vehicle for the series, allowing both business and academic communities to share their insights on what drives digital change, how to manage the change and how to master the complexity. Over 240,000 users have signed up to learn with the openSAP platform since its launch in May 2013.