Harley-Davidson Creates Chief Digital Officer Role

Harley-Davidson has announced that former Bose executive Jagdish Krishnan will take over the newly created role of Chief Digital Officer. Krishnan will be responsible for the development of a new digital strategy intended to improve the customer retail experience with direct-to-consumer technology for e-commerce and dealer digitization. This includes building seamless digital interfaces with products, services, commerce, and Harley-Davidson’s global dealer network. To enable this strategy, Krishnan will also lead the modernization of the company’s global information systems to make them more customer-centric.

The creation of the new Chief Digital Officer role is part of The Rewire strategy, unveiled by Harley-Davidson’s new CEO. The Rewire is aimed at overhauling the company’s operating model and provide a better starting point for the future. The Chief Digital Officer is one of several roles and functions created or elevated to report directly to the Chairman, President, and CEO, Jochen Zeitz to build desirability for the Harley-Davidson brand and products.

“Harley-Davidson is all about experiences, and an enhanced digital experience is absolutely critical for us to make our GIS and digital capabilities more customer-centric. We will take a completely different approach to apply digital technology across the company to fundamentally change how we operate and create value. To deliver on our objectives, we must have an innovative and high-performance IT function,” said Jochen Zeitz, chairman, president, and CEO of Harley-Davidson. “We need to be a high-performing team with cutting edge leadership to move us forward. Jagdish is exactly the right leader and he will ensure we connect with our customers at all touch-points.”

Krishnan has over two decades of experience leading digital transformation and delivers solutions to position organizations for advanced growth. Prior to joining Harley-Davidson, Krishnan served as Vice President and Chief Digital Officer at Bose Corporation. Before Bose, he was with Deloitte & Touche and Patni Computer Systems, where he had a broad mix of experiences including Profit & Loss responsibility, information security, enterprise software deployment, programming, and IT operations. Krishnan has a Bachelor of Science with Honours in Computer Engineering from Pune University and a Master’s Degree in Data Communication and Distributed Systems from Oxford University.