We've got the power - the relevance of IT leadership and organizational IT capabilities in the fully digitized business era

Modern information technologies allow for an ever increasing digitization of business processes in various industries around the globe. This requires an organization-wide digital mindset and IT capabilities to react agile in turbulent business environments. Which enabling role CIOs have to develop IT capabilities as necessary predecessor to develop organization-wide strategic IT alignment is still unclear. How strategic IT alignment as means to react to rapid market changes can be achieved as consequence of organization-wide capabilities has not been answered yet. In this research, we capture individual and organizational factors characterizing the CIO position and combine them with two preliminary stages of IT competencies, IT infrastructure and IT capabilities, in a single nomological net to identify their influence on strategic IT alignment. Evaluating the results by means of a broad sample collected within a survey among 141 IT-decision makers in the U.S., our partial least squares analysis supports most of our hypotheses, notably verifying the influence of CIOs on organizational structures and strategic IT alignment, therefore fully mediated by IT capabilities. Building on Mintzberg, we propose strengthening the CIO leadership position furthermore throughout the entire organization to cope with the challenges arising from the ongoing digitization of business processes

You'll Be Surprised - Digital Business Strategy as Driver of Organizational Innovativeness

The presence of digital infrastructures fundamentally changes market conditions, business and IT strategy, and consequently organizational structures. This research investigates how the concept of a digital business strategy leads to increased organizational innovativeness and firm performance. We demonstrate how IT capabilities contribute to organizational innovativeness and induce the CIO’s positive role for IT-enabled business innovation. By means of an online survey among 228 IT decision makers in knowledge-intensive industries in the U.S., the results reveal organizational innovativeness being significantly higher influenced by the IT knowledge of business employees in organizations giving the digital business strategy high importance, whereas the top management team IT knowledge plays a greater role when digital business strategy is given low priority. By this research, we deliver first results of consequences for organizations conducting a digital business strategy and contribute to the discussion on IT-enabled innovation, CIO leadership, and the increasing relevance of organization-wide IT capabilities

The Development of the Web and Its Impact on Libraries and Scholarly Communications

In 2011 when I was given the opportunity of taking a research leave to explore a topic of my choice, I immediately thought of the changes in which we find information today both in our work and home lives. This was a natural reaction for me because ever since I had initiated my studies of librarianship and information science, I had been most interested in technology and its impact on libraries. This started with Professor Susan Artandi at Rutgers when I first learned of systems analysis and library automation and reached greater fruition under Professor Leon Montgomery\u27s instruction on programming languages—learning PIL (Pitt Interpretitive Language) and FORTRAN—and their use in automating library procedures. It continued and gained greater steam as I pursued my career in administering first college and then research libraries. In my administrative career I always tried to either be a pioneer in services enhanced by technology or be close to the curve. This was true when I initiated online database searching in the early days of DIALOG and also became an early adopter of OCLC integrated online services. At Western Kentucky University where I spent the majority of my library leadership experience, it was a priority that we serve as early adopters of technology that showed the potential of enhancing our services in some considerable way. I was fortunate to have a strong and willing faculty and staff corps to lead. As a result, we launched several firsts, including the first web site in Kentucky and also the first digital institutional repository (TopSCHOLAR). Nationally we also distinguished ourselves as we developed one of the first homegrown information portals, and, as mobile technology took fruit, one of the first library mobile sites. With the availability of iPhone apps, we released one of the first university library apps and also an iPad version of our library newsletter. And when social networking gained prominence, we were early Facebook adopters and Twitter tweeters. Hence I lived and breathed the development of technology and social media throughout my administrative career. During my research leave and for awhile afterward, I looked at the background behind these significant contemporary developments in an effort to better understand them both for myself, and for you, the reader. I hope you will benefit from reading this report as much as I did in researching and writing it. Changes in the topics continue to occur regularly and in this hyper-connected instantaneous world in which we live, are reported on almost every minute. I kid you not. Just follow the twitter commentaries of leading technological and social media gurus and you will understand what I mean, if your initial reaction is, really? To maintain the currency of my understanding of developments in the fields encompassed by the report, I will be posting entries in my soon-to-be launched blog, Library and Tech Trends Watcher. I hope you will take a look

E-Government and the City of Buffalo

As the United States continues to progress, the need for technological innovations has become increasingly important in the field of government. Federal, state and local governments are working towards the implementation and development of e-government practices. E-government began with the Clinton Administration in the mid 2000s, where the administration identified e-government as a way to promote a one stop access to government programs, cut costs and promote citizen advocacy in government (Moon, 2002). The purpose of this study was to explore the different departments in the City of Buffalo that are in charge of creating and implementing e-government projects. These projects are meant to improve and provide the necessary tools to help citizens communicate and request government services within their community. In this study the researcher set out to acquire qualitative interview data from Buffalo City Hall employees that have been involved with the implementation of e-government in the City of Buffalo. The interviews were composed of a series of questions to uncover implementer’s perspectives as to where the City of Buffalo stands in the e-government sphere. To validate these findings, a content analysis was performed on the City of Buffalo’s main website, their public Open Data website, the Buffalo roam parking app and the Buffalo 311 citizens services app. Findings based on this research suggest that the City of Buffalo is in somewhat good standing when it comes to the e-government implementation; however, there is still room for development

How Black Swan events reveal known and unknown unknowns : the case of COVID-19

The unknown offers a great puzzle to strategists. Black Swan events, characterized by rare occurrence and retrospective predictability, have extreme impacts on economies and societies (Taleb, 2007). The primary research purpose of this study is to examine whether Black Swan events increase awareness of known and unknown unknowns by discovering perceptions of existing and novel uncertainties. Precisely, we analyze how unexpected tail events enhance consciousness of unknown unknows and alter mental models of known uncertainties. To discover a recent Black Swan phenomenon, we chose the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) as empirical context. Qualitative examination of 36 semi-structured interviews implies that the Coronavirus crisis considerably changes the range of uncertainties, which can shape future management research and practice. Although the majority of discovered uncertainty areas (72.5%) were recognized ex ante COVID-19, our findings show that the current pandemic also reveals strategically relevant unknown unknowns. Based on the framework of environmental uncertainty developed by Jauch and Kraft (1986), we develop a novel model that illustrates strategic decision-making in the context of Black Swan uncertainties. 2020’s Black Swan, COVID-19, triggers strategic decision-makers to reconsider current interdependencies to reduce the potential harm of future uncertainty shocks. Since our results disclose that uncertainty related to Black Swan events essentially creates novel uncertainties, executives are required to acknowledge that they cannot ignore or eliminate uncertainty. Instead, managers are advised to embrace the occurrence of Black Swans and the existence of known and unknown unknowns for (anti)knowledge exploration.O desconhecido traz um grande quebra-cabeça para estrategistas. Os eventos conhecidos como Cisne Negro são caracterizados por terem uma ocorrência rara e previsibilidade retrospetiva. Estes têm grande impacto nas economias e sociedades (Taleb, 2007). O objetivo principal deste estudo é examinar se os eventos Cisne Negro aumentam a conscientização sobre incertezas conhecidas e desconhecidas, através do descobrimento de perceções sobre incertezas existentes e novas. Para explorar um fenômeno recente do cisne negro, escolhemos o novo Coronavírus (COVID-19) como contexto empírico. A examinação qualitativa sobre 36 entrevistas semiestruturadas sugere que a crise do Coronavírus altera consideravelmente o leque de incertezas, o que pode resultar na moldura de futuras práticas de gestão e pesquisa. Embora a maioria das áreas de incerteza descobertas (72,5%) tenham sido reconhecidas ex ante COVID-19, nossos resultados mostram que a pandemia atual também revela incertezas desconhecidas estrategicamente relevantes. Com base na estrutura de incerteza do ambiente desenvolvida por Jauch e Kraft (1986), desenvolvemos um novo modelo que ilustra a tomada de decisões estratégicas no contexto das incertezas do Cisne Negro. A COVID-19 faz com que os tomadores de decisão estratégicas reconsiderem as interdependências atuais para reduzir o dano potencial de futuros choques de incerteza. Como nossos resultados revelam que a incerteza relacionada aos eventos do Cisne Negro cria novas incertezas, os executivos devem reconhecer que não podem ignorá-las ou eliminá-las. Em vez disso, os gerentes são aconselhados a adotar a ocorrência de cisnes negros e a existência de incertezas conhecidas e desconhecidas para a exploração do conhecimento (prévio)

Innovate within product lines or outside of them? An ethnographic study of corporate innovation in a corporate venture makerspace.

Organizational forms firms use for innovating include R&D departments, corporate venturing, and open innovation. This dissertation examines a new form for corporate innovation—the corporate venture makerspace. Makerspaces are “shared production facilities,” and scholars suggest they are environments in which to create; yet few firms have adopted them as a means to innovate. This dissertation is an ethnographic study in which I examine why a large corporation with active R&D centers and limited resources also has a corporate venture makerspace as a secondary innovation mechanism when both organizations serve the same overarching function: explorative learning activities intended to generate innovative products, increasing the parent company’s profitability. I ask in what ways does this organization implement its institutional logics into its organizational design, and what benefits or drawbacks, if any, result from its design. The reason why the organization ended up with a traditional R&D department and a corporate venture makerspace is because the makerspace was supposed to be a means to achieve more breakthrough innovations, but a historical process unfolded when product successes required increased capabilities and resource spreading, generating increased pressures to adopt a different logic. When products underperformed, additional logics, further increasing similarity, were incorporated to avoid future failure. The study contributes to the discussion of new product development within a corporate venture, demonstrating intentional and unintentional ways innovation is enabled and constrained. The results suggest important practical implications for corporate venture managers, particularly ways in which initial innovation goals can be replaced when products succeed or fail

Academic Health Science Centers and Health Disparities: A Qualitative Review of the Intervening Role of the Electronic Health Record and Social Determinants of Health

Literature on the magnitude of negative health outcomes from health disparities is voluminous. Defined as the health effects of racism, environmental injustice, forms of discrimination, biases in science, and sociological or socioeconomic predictors across populations, health disparities are part of an ongoing and complicated national problem that health equity programs are specifically designed to address. Academic Health Science Centers (AHC) institutions are a complex and unique educational-healthcare ecosystem that often serves as a safety net for patients in vulnerable and lower-income communities. These institutions are often viewed as one of the most uniquely positioned entities in the U.S. with an abundance of resources and networks to advance health equity as a high-impact goal and strategic imperative. Relatively little progress, however, has been made to better understand the potentially transformative nature of how digital health technologies (DHT)—such as mobile health apps, electronic health record (EHR) and electronic medical record (EMR) systems, smart ‘wearable’ devices, artificial intelligence, and machine learning—may be optimized to better capture and analyze social determinants of health (SDH) data elements in order to inform strategies to address health disparities. Even less has been explored about the challenging implementation of electronic SDH screening and data capture processes within AHCs and how they are used to better inform decisions for patient and community care. This research examines how AHC institutions, as complex education-healthcare bureaucracies, have prioritized this specific challenge amongst many other competing incentives and agendas in order to ultimately develop better evidence-based strategies to advance health equity. While there are clear moral, ethical, and clinical motives for improving health outcomes for vulnerable populations, when an AHC demonstrates that electronically screening and capturing SDH can improve the ability to understand the “upstream” factors impacting their patients\u27 health outcomes, this can inform and influence policy-level choices in government legislation directed at community-level factors. A qualitative thematic analysis of interview data from AHC administrators and leadership illustrates how AHCs have mobilized their EHR as a featured component of their healthcare delivery system to address health disparities, exposing other related, multifactorial dimensions of the Institution and region. Key findings indicated that: electronic SDH screening and updating workflow processes within an AHC’s clinical enterprise is a significant venture with multiple risks and the potential of failure. Universal adoption and awareness of SDH screening is hampered by notions of hesitancy, skepticism, and doubt as to an AHC’s ability to meaningfully extract and use the data for decision-support systems. Additional investment in resources and incentive structures for capturing SDH are needed for continued monitoring of patient health inequalities and community social factors. Data from this and future replicated studies can be used to inform AHC and government decisions around health and social protection, planning, and policy

AI and blockchain adoption in corporate governance

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonPurpose The purpose of this doctoral thesis sets out to explore and elaborate on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain adoption in corporate governance from ethical perspectives. Positioned within the corporate governance domain, this study adopts an explicit business perspective to study corporate governance change with emerging AI and blockchain technological tools in general and focuses on the ethical use of technologies specifically. As such, this empirical investigation aims to help organizations understand the ethical benefits and ethical dilemmas of using AI and blockchain in businesses and draw plans on how to govern these technologies ethically for the benefit of the business and society. Design/Methodology/Approach: This study adopts specific techniques and a pragmatic, step-by-step netnography approach to investigate online traces from social media sites and extends these online explorations with online semi-structured interviews. The research design of this investigation follows step-by-step procedures that are methodologically sound to ensure rigor in this investigation to enhance the trustworthiness of this study. In total, this research collects an abundance of data: 34 LinkedIn Posts with Comments; 12 Webinars; 22 YouTube Videos; 19 Videos; 10 Podcasts, and 17 semi-structured interview videos. The video, audio, and interview data have been transcribed into textual data total of 453065 words for thematic analysis using NVivo software. Enough time has been allocated to the iterative process of data collection and data analysis. The analysis moves back and forth to the point when theoretical saturation is achieved. The data structure extracts from data in this study illustrate the analytic claims that match the analysis and data together, to ensure a good fit between described method and reported analysis are consistent. Findings: This study develops a thematic framework that constitutes the corporate governance transformation with the ethical use of AI and blockchain technology. This framework provides a holistic understanding of why corporate governance needs to change, especially with the emergence of blockchain and AI technologies, what changes will corporate governance encounter, and how corporate governance can imperatively respond to the ethical use of these technologies. Specifically, it explicitly provides comprehensive understanding of the ethical benefits and ethical concerns of using AI and blockchain technologies in corporate governance, and reveals how companies can govern the use of these technologies ethically. In general terms, the findings of this study support the notion of corporate governance change to transform business models and processes to leverage the new capabilities of AI and blockchain technologies, to priories creativity, speed, and accountability, to replace the old business model, to foster agile or collaborative governance to deal with uncertainty, agility, adaptiveness, and cooperation in the digital world, to foster a network and platform strategies to drive success. This study goes beyond the extant corporate governance scholarship to assess the technological impact to capture values for companies in ethical ways to sustain future growth. Additionally, the notion of corporate governance is further specified and significantly expanded by this study to assess the adoption of AI and blockchain as new corporate governance tools or mechanisms, to enhance ethical benefits when used properly, and mitigate ethical dilemmas with proper checks and balances, safeguards in place, to help organizations stay relevant in this digital transformation and be ethical and sustainable. This study empirically corroborates that in theory, the use of blockchain and AI can enhance ethical practice by detecting fraud and anomaly activities, due to the unique capabilities of blockchain and AI technologies. Further, this research adds depth and specificity by identifying the ethical concerns of using blockchain and AI in corporate governance. The study empirically reveals the ethical concerns of privacy issues, unethical use of data, job transformation and replacement, and algorithm bias that companies will encounter when they use these technologies. In addition, the findings of this study suggest how companies can ethically govern the use of these technologies in socially responsible ways as they transform digitally. Originality/Value: The emergent thematic framework is constructed from the empirical and analytical procedures specifically and purposely designed for this study. This study makes theoretical contributions to knowledge and enriches the extant works of literature, and also provides practical contributions to the ethical use of disruptive technologies, future workforce, and regulations. However, the study was conducted within certain theoretical, methodological, empirical, and pragmatic conditions, which might constitute particular limitations and constraints. Therefore, the last section of this thesis elucidates and suggests the directions for future research

Digital transformation in organizations: an analysis of organisational determinants for success

Emerging digital technologiesforce organizations across all industries torethink their business models and organizational structures. Digital Transformation(DT)is a hot topic in business, yet academic literature has understudied the phenomenon.This study defines DTas a fundamental organizational changeand identifies a positive relationship between organizational size, scope and competition and the decision to start the process of DT. It finds, however, that these same factors become the biggest hurdles to successful organizational change andidentifies the importance of specific leadership behaviorsto overcome the challenges and increase the probability of successful DT projects

SPACE: Vision and Reality: Face to Face. Proceedings Report

The proceedings of the 11th National Space Symposium entitled 'Vision and Reality: Face to Face' is presented. Technological areas discussed include the following sections: Vision for the future; Positioning for the future; Remote sensing, the emerging era; space opportunities, Competitive vision with acquisition reality; National security requirements in space; The world is into space; and The outlook for space. An appendice is also attached