Concluding Remarks and Final Thoughts on Digital Transformation

While we have accumulated much knowledge over the past decades about how organizations engage in digital transformation, future developments are likely to make a lot of this knowledge at least partially obsolete. New forms of working and organizing, along with an increased collaboration between human and machine, are likely to give rise to new forms of digital transformation, novel practices and approaches, and significantly different strategies. Nevertheless, such changes are likely to be gradual. This is due to the fact that emerging technologies require time to mature and to be assimilated in organizational processes. In this concluding chapter, we lay out some final thoughts about digital transformation, as well as how it will likely unfold in Norwegian organizations.publishedVersio

The Way Forward: A Practical Guideline for Successful Digital Transformation

This chapter presents key lessons learned and implications for practice resulting from the analysis of the empirical cases included in this book. We map emerging themes across five layers: unit or project, organization, organization ecosystem, ethical and environmental sustainability, and society. We identify two emerging trends: the co-evolution of organizational forms and new technologies and the fact that digital transformation increasingly happens on the organizational ecosystem level. This has consequences in terms of increased data work, new work processes, and the need to actively engage with sustainability policies. We highlight the need for a focus on the long-term effects of digital transformation initiatives with attention to their ripple effects over time.publishedVersio

An Introduction to Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has been one of the most studied phenomena in information systems (IS) and organizational science literature. With novel digital technologies emerging at a growing pace, it is important to understand what we have learned in over three decades of research and what we still need to understand in order to harness the full potential of such digital tools. In this chapter, we present a brief overview of digital transformation and develop a conceptual framework which we use as a basis of discussing the extant literature. The conceptual framework is also used as a means of positioning the empirical chapters presented in the rest of this edited volume. Finally, we discuss the role of context in digital transformation and identify some differences that span industry, domain, size class, and country of operation.publishedVersio

A Framework for Digital Transformation for Research and Practice: Putting Things into Perspective

The past years of researching digital transformation and the accumulated experience of practitioners in deploying projects of novel digital technologies have allowed us to gain much valuable insight about the process. From this assembly of knowledge, there is a lot we can learn about how to conduct future research, as well as a depth of knowledge regarding best practices that can aid practitioners. In this chapter, we provide some key input on how research and practice can approach digital transformation and discuss some ideas that are likely to be central in the near future. We draw on some streams of literature which have yet to be fully integrated in the current discourse of digital transformation research and provide some practical guidelines that can aid practitioners at different levels. We conclude with a brief overview of some key technologies which are likely to be in the spotlight of attention in the upcoming years and discuss their implications for research and practice.publishedVersio

The Case of Norway and Digital Transformation over the Years

Norway is generally characterized by a pervasive presence of digital services. It is currently undergoing a digital transformation across different domains, from daily life to public and private enterprises. In this introductory chapter, we first unpack the main drivers of digital transformation in Norway so far and its enabling conditions based on three illustrative examples: the development of Altinn, a digital platform supporting digital communication between citizens and public and private organizations; the evolution of BankID, Norway’s electronic identification system; and the current push for open data sharing leveraging experiences in the energy industry. We identify key common enabling conditions: a trust-based cooperation across social partners and across public and private sectors, the public sector’s driving role, cross-organization consolidations and consortia, and application-oriented initiatives. In the second part of the chapter, we summarize the content of the subsequent chapters in this book shedding light on different facets of digital transformation in Norway.publishedVersio

Social Media for Open Innovation: A Study of Adoption Determinants

This study develops a conceptual model to examine determinants of social media adoption for open innovation at the firm level. Building on the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework, six facilitating conditions are hypothesized to influence a firms` decision to deploy social media technologies for open innovation purposes. Partial least squares (PLS) analysis was used to empirically test our conceptual model on survey data from 120 firms operating in Greece and Cyprus. Outcomes show that large firms are more likely to adopt social media as part of their open innovation strategy, as are firms with a broad external knowledge transfer scope. High competitive intensity, technological dynamism, as well as stringent intellectual property protection regimes tend to positively impact adoption levels of social media

A STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT MODEL FOR IT FLEXIBILITY AND DYNAMIC CAPABILITIES: TOWARD AN ASSESSMENT TOOL

The Dynamic Capabilities View (DCV) has emerged as an influential theoretical and management framework in modern IS research. However, despite the view\u27s significant contributions, its strength and core focus are essentially in its use for historical firm performance explanation. Furthermore, valuable contributions have been made by several researchers in order to extend the DCV to fit the constantly changing IT environments and other imperative drivers for competitive performance. Nevertheless, to our knowledge, no DCV extension has been developed which allows firms to assess their current state of maturity and to derive imperative steps for further performance enhancement. To fill this gap, this article develops a strategic alignment model for IT flexibility and dynamic capabilities and empirically validates proposed hypotheses using correlation and regression analyses on a sample of 322 international firms. Findings suggest that there is a positive relationship between a firm’s degree of alignment of IT flexibility and dynamic capability dimensions – defined as the degree of balance between all dimensions – and competitive firm performance. Alignment can, therefore, be seen as an important condition that significantly influences a firm’s competitive advantage in constantly changing environments. The proposed framework helps firms assess and improve their IT flexibility and dynamic capabilities. Results are discussed, while theoretical and practical implications are highlighted, concluding with suggestions for future research