Digital Innovation, Transformation, and Entrepreneurship
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ItemThe DevOps Funnel: Introducing DevOps as an Antecedent for Digitalization in Large-Scale Organizations( 2023-01-03)Business productivity and speed to market are among the top priorities of IS managers to stay successful. To achieve these goals, a change in business processes or models is often required, which is often linked to the phenomenon of digitalization. Enterprises have observed that a holistic approach to agile IS development is essential to enable this change, leading to the concept of “DevOps”. While past studies have delivered first insights about DevOps, an understanding of which factors are important to introduce DevOps in organizations, and how DevOps relates to digitalization, is still missing. To close this gap, we conducted a two-staged study of literature review and multiple-case study. Our findings suggest that DevOps links success and practices for development and operations across actors of different organizational levels. We find that DevOps supports digitalization efforts, contribute to the understanding of the DevOps phenomenon and identify worthwhile paths for further research.
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ItemModularity Archetypes and Their Coexistence in Technological Development: The Case of a Telecoms Company from Analogue Voice to 5G( 2023-01-03)Modularity is a key concept in the research and practice of information systems. Yet, it has been variously interpreted. Synthesizing the literature, we inductively develop a two-by-two matrix encapsulating two dualities of modularity: architectural vs. governance dimensions, and bottom-up vs. top-down perspectives. This matrix groups the literatures into four archetypical approaches to modularity (Engineering, Ecosystem, Generative and Logical). We next illustrate these archetypes through a qualitative study of a large global telecommunications firm. Drawing upon archival data and interviews, we show how each of these four approaches to modularity become dominant at different times, but also how they overlap and coexist.
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ItemStrategy for managing project front-end of digital transformation – a case for a multidimensional and creative conceptualization( 2023-01-03)In any human endeavors, a sound strategy constitutes a key success factor. In this essay, we discuss the concept of strategy, its manifestation in digital transformation, and a strategy for managing project front-end activities in digital transformation. More precisely, we first highlight the multidimensional nature of strategy, then different strategies found in digital transformation. Finally, we propose a metaphor with a potential to enhance the understanding of strategy for managing project front-end activities in digital transformation through a vivid description of related phenomena. Overall, this essay advances knowledge in Information Systems through a multidimensional and creative conceptualization of strategy. More precisely, we hope to enhance theory for analyzing and theory for design and action in this field.
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ItemConceptualization of Digital Twins in an Education Services Environment: A Straw Man Proposal( 2023-01-03)Digital twins have been used in manufacturing to describe, predict, and prescribe responses to complex problems. The digital twin is a constellation of technologies that mirror physical objects in the virtual world, including what has happened, is happening and could or should happen in the future for the mirrored object. What is common in previous conceptualizations of digital twins is that there is a physical boundary to the extent that digital twins can mirror real objects (sometimes including the objects’ environments). We propose a blended approach, using McKinsey’s straw man and Parmar et al.’s. (2020) framework, to offer a more rigorously structured process for arriving at a refined conceptualization of digital twins in the educational service environment.
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ItemLeading Digital Innovation Units: A Repertory Grid Study about Key Skills for the Digital Age( 2023-01-03)To combat the trend of failing Digital Transformation endeavors, dedicated leadership skills are needed. However, so far there is little knowledge about the skills for successfully leading Digital Innovation Units (DIUs). We, therefore, interviewed 13 DIU leaders from various industries and elicited their skills with the Repertory Grid method. We identified 54 key skills clustered in seven categories: team development, integration of the DIU into the wider context of the organization, innovation management, personal traits, effective communication, hard skills, and visionary thinking and driving change. Furthermore, we found five influencing factors for the application of key skills: Financial support, uncertainty, certainty in tasks, stability of the product, freedom to operate, and degree of collaboration with the core organization. Finally, we report on three skill enhancers (actions, attitudes, conditions) for practitioners. We complement prior research by improving the understanding of the ideal DIU leader skill profile.
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ItemDo Procedure Models Actually Guide Maturity Model Design? A Citation Analysis( 2023-01-03)More than a decade ago, guidelines for the development of maturity models were proposed in the form of procedure models. In theory, such procedure models provide scholars with guidance, but does the scientific community actually use them according to their intended purpose. This paper conducts a citation analysis and identifies an impressive number of citations. However, it is noteworthy that the publications are mainly cited for other reasons, such as the components or the general purposes of maturity models. The analysis also provides indications that many maturity models are developed without using a procedure model. Despite the fact that methodological rigor is considered a crucial criterion for publishing articles, maturity model designers might have concerns about using domain-specific procedure models. Future studies should address the reasons for this reluctance.
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ItemExploiting Exploration: Reintegrating Digital Innovations from Digital Innovation Units( 2023-01-03)In digital transformation, incumbents are pressured to exploit their core business and simultaneously explore opportunities for digital innovation. When pursuing ambidexterity, organizations establish digital innovation units (DIUs) dedicated to digital innovation. Due to the novelty of the phenomenon, prior studies targeted DIUs' design, objectives, and challenges. However, their value lies in reintegrating digital innovations back into the operational organization for use and commercialization, which has been neglected so far. Thus, we analyze the reintegration based on a single-embedded case study of four heterogeneous DIUs. We identify three phases of reintegration activities and trace differences to the contextual factors: innovation orientation, number of involved entities, and ownership. Our contribution is twofold. First, we shed light on the reintegration of DIUs' innovation outcomes for the first time. Second, we extend research on digital innovation and ambidexterity by outlining drivers and inhibitors of reintegration, enhancing our understanding of how organizations can exploit exploration.
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ItemExplaining Change with Digital Trace Data: A Framework for Temporal Bracketing( 2023-01-03)Digital trace data, along with computational techniques to analyze them, provide novel means to study how organizational phenomena change over time. Yet, as digital traces typically lack context, it is challenging to explain why and how such changes take place. In this paper, we discuss temporal bracketing as an approach to integrate context into digital trace data-based research. We conceptualize a framework to apply temporal bracketing in the analysis of digital trace data. We showcase our framework on the grounds of data from an onboarding process of a financial institution in Central Europe. We point to several implications for computationally intensive theory development around change with digital trace data.
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ItemScaling AI Ventures: How to Navigate Tensions between Automation and Augmentation( 2023-01-03)AI ventures promise to automate and augment ever more human tasks. This provides rich opportunities for growth. Yet, digital and human resources that involve AI are oftentimes task-specific and hard to scale. Furthermore, clients remain skeptical to be fully automated by external services. Thus, it remains unclear how AI ventures achieve growth. We adopt a grounded theory approach on an interview study with founders, product managers and investors to inquire how resources afford or constrain scaling in AI ventures. For this, we blend the notion of (non-)scale free resources with the layered architecture of digital technologies. Our study suggests that AI ventures scale by organizing digital and human resources for replicability in that they keep AI-specific resources distant from clients while simultaneously externalizing human-intensive tasks to their clients. As we inquire the roles of human and digital resources, our study suggests that ventures seek to quickly find an optimal degree on the continuum between augmentation and automation when bundling resources.
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