Abstract:

The world has increasingly become knowledge-centric driven by advancements in the information society and created a need for digital-age leadership skills. Digital leaders with clear digital strategies are in great demand across the globe. Higher education institutions are not insulated given the observed low levels of e-readiness accession in Kenya Education Network e-readiness survey of 2013. This calls for a review of the approach on leadership in higher education institutions for the improvement of e-readiness. This study reviews Wallin’s leadership orchestration model for the digital age with the leader as an architect, conductor, promoter and auctioneer fused with leadership development, and its influence on e-readiness accession in higher education institutions in Kenya. The study reviews the traditional approaches to e-readiness assessment and proposes a novel model based on people, process and technology and service quality as the core basis for e-readiness assessment. A cross-sectional survey design is used with respondents drawn from a purposive sample of higher education institutions in Kenya based on the Commission for University Education data. Bivariate regression is used to estimate the magnitude and direction of the correlations. The results indicate that leader as a conductor, architect, auctioneer, promoter and developer are highly correlated with e-readiness accession with r values ranging between 0.5 and 0.75 which are significant at p<0.001 level of significance. The people, process and technology aggregate measure of e-readiness is also highly correlated with service quality with r=0.811 with p<0.001.

Keywords:

E-readiness accession, leadership orchestration, e-readiness assessment.