The Architectural Enablement of a Digital Platform Strategy

Abstract

Facing the opportunities and threats arising from digitalization, traditional brick-and-mortar companies are increasingly following the lead of digital natives and seeking speed in the development of digital value propositions. This ability hinges on the flexibility and evolvability of each company’s existing information systems landscape. As a result, the underlying architecture has turned into a crucial determinant of a company’s proficiency to leverage the business potential induced by new inventions in digital technologies. This PhD thesis elaborates on the digitalization journey of the LEGO Group to investigate how companies create innovation-enabling platform architectures to overcome previous limitations to digital innovation as well as international expansion. Based on the theoretical findings from four individual research papers, the pervasive analysis presented in this thesis explains the phenomenon of architecting from a configurational perspective. The research results provide a contingent conceptual understanding of the mechanisms through which architecture decisionmaking produces innovation-enabling or -constraining outcomes for the overall platform architecture. Portraying Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a central mechanism to guide the transformational journey, the four individual research papers explain (1) how the dynamic capability of EA can be built, (2) how EA as a function drives a company’s platformization journey, and (3) how this transformation removes previous barriers to digital innovation as well as internationalization into digitized markets