Selection, Adaption and Use of IS and Business Development Methods in Digitalization Projects

Abstract

As digitalization has a significant impact on all industries, it is important to examine how digitalization methods are selected and applied. For that, we conducted two-step research: first, a survey examining how the connection of IT and digital business management affects business development management, followed by digitalization project participant interviews. We can conclude that method selection is done rarely, and even if it is done, project participants are not always aware of it. In addition, although business development objectives were largely emphasized, business development methods were scarce. Instead of deploying systematic business development, it was easily left as a vague part of IS development. Quite often, projects (willingly or accidentally) utilized some kind of hybrid method, but its elements were not combined systematically. As one result, we propose a new kind of hybrid method evaluation tool to be used in the method selection phase.