The Nature of Digital Technologies - Development of a Multi-Layer Taxonomy

Digitalization disrupts business models and smartifies products and services. Based on the ever-faster emergence and adoption of digital technologies such as the Internet of Things, blockchain, or augmented reality, digitalization irreversibly changes our private lives and organizational routines from all industries on a global scale. Thereby, digitalization develops unlimited potential in terms of innovation, connectivity, efficiency and productivity improvements. However, research and practice still lack a fundamental understanding of the nature of digital technologies. To address this gap, we developed a multi-layer taxonomy of digital technologies that includes eight dimensions structured along the layers of established modular architectures, i.e. service, content, network, and device. Based on our taxonomy, we also identified seven archetypes of digital technologies by means of a cluster analysis. To revise and evaluate our artefacts, we classified 45 digital technologies from the Gartner Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies and conducted evaluation rounds with other researchers. Our results contribute to the descriptive knowledge on digital technologies. They enable researchers and practitioners to classify digital technologies on two levels of aggregation and to make informed decisions about their adoption

How to Exploit the Digitalization Potential of Business Processes

Process improvement is the most value-adding activity in the business process management (BPM) lifecycle. Despite mature knowledge, many approaches have been criticized to lack guidance on how to put process improvement into practice. Given the variety of emerging digital technologies, organizations not only face a process improvement black box, but also high uncertainty regarding digital technologies. This paper thus proposes a method that supports organizations in exploiting the digitalization potential of their business processes. To achieve this, action design research and situational method engineering were adopted. Two design cycles involving practitioners (i.e., managers and BPM experts) and end-users (i.e., process owners and participants) were conducted. In the first cycle, the method’s alpha version was evaluated by interviewing practitioners from five organizations. In the second cycle, the beta version was evaluated via real-world case studies. In this paper, detailed results of one case study, which was conducted at a semiconductor manufacturer, are included

Investigating the Co-Creation of IT Consulting Service Value : Empirical Findings of a Matched Pair Analysis

Digitalization is increasingly and broadly impacting on companies throughout all industries. To cope with digital transformation, organizations need specific IT skills and often face a bottleneck between required and existing capabilities. Thus, organizations revert to support from IT consultants. However, such collaborations need to create value so as to make client organizations future-proof in the long term. We therefore need a better understanding of how value is created in IT consulting projects. We build on service-dominant (S-D) logic as the theory base and evaluate our structural model, which explains IT consulting service value based on 77 matched pairs of IT consulting projects using structural equation modeling. We provide empirical support for the assumptions of S-D logic in the IT consulting industry and reveal determinants that significantly contribute to the overall IT consulting service value. Our results contribute to the ongoing discourse in the S-D logic literature and provide meaningful insights for practice