Digitalization

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Dynamic Ambidexterity: Exploiting Exploration for Business Success in the Digital Age

In the digital age, many firms find the pace of change in their industry is increasing. New competitors emerge from previously unrelated industries and innovative digital business models can quickly disrupt well-established market dynamics. Such jolts in the competitive landscape require existing players to be continually innovating while also “keeping the lights on” to maintain existing revenue streams. This paper reviews the IS literature on ambidexterity – the ability to simultaneously pursue strategies of resource exploration and exploitation – and advances a theoretical model for embedding innovative business models into existing organizational routines. It contributes to the literature by reconciling the structural and contextual views of ambidexterity through introducing a dynamic ambidexterity framework. This approach proposes ambidexterity as a dynamic capability which requires differing mechanisms in the initiation and implementation phases of innovation.

Why Your Company Needs More Collaboration

Digitization demands a focus on cooperation and collaboration that is unprecedented for most enterprises.What distinguishes companies that have built advanced digital capabilities? The ability to collaborate. MIT Sloan Management Review’s research finds that a focus on collaboration — both within organizations and with external partners and stakeholders — is central to how digitally advanced companies create business value and establish competitive advantage. These companies recognize that digital transformation blurs — and sometimes obliterates — traditional organizational boundaries and demands a focus on cooperation and collaboration that is unprecedented for most enterprises. Based on a global survey of more than 3,500 managers and executives, MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte’s third annual report on digital business found that the most digitally advanced companies – those successfully deploying digital technologies and capabilities to improve processes, engage talent across the organization, and drive new value-generating business models – are far more likely to perform cross-functional collaboration. More than 70% of these businesses use cross-functional teams to organize work and charge them with implementing digital business priorities. This compares to less than 30% for organizations in an early stage of digitization.

How Smart, Connected Products Are Transforming Competition

Information technology is revolutionizing products. Once composed solely of mechanical and electrical parts, products have become complex systems that combine hardware, sensors, data storage, microprocessors, software, and connectivity in myriad ways. These smart, connected products – made possible by vast improvements in processing power and device miniaturization and by the network benefits of ubiquitous wireless connectivity – have unleashed a new era of competition. Smart, connected products offer exponentially expanding opportunities for new functionality, far greater reliability, much higher product utilization, and capabilities that cut across and transcend traditional product boundaries. The changing nature of products is also disrupting value chains, forcing companies to rethink and retool nearly everything they do internally. Smart, connected products raise a broad set of new strategic choices for companies about how value is created and captured, how to work with traditional partners and what new partnerships will be required, and how to secure competitive advantage as the new capabilities reshape industry boundaries. For many firms, smart, connected products will force the fundamental question: What business am I in? This article provides a framework for developing strategy and achieving competitive advantage in a smart, connected world.

Becoming a Digital Organization: The Journey to Digital Dexterity

As the digital age unfolds, executives face new strategic choices about how to take advantage of fast-moving technology innovations. Prior research showed that value comes not simply from adopting digital technology, but from using technology to transform the way a company does business. But while the term digital transformation is much in vogue, relatively less attention is paid to the design of the organization that must fulfill the chosen digital strategies. New digitally-enabled possibilities for designing, organizing, and managing productive work challenge leaders to make choices about how to operate (organizational design choices) as well as what to produce (strategic choices). This paper builds on interview and survey data from over 150 organizations to develop a model of digital organizational design. We identify a core set of organizational characteristics (including mindsets, practices and resources) that underpin enterprise development of Digital Capability to improve customer experience, internal operations or employee engagement. We introduce the concept of Digital Dexterity, the sustained organizational ability to rapidly adapt and self-organize to take advantage of emerging digital possibilities, and show that these same organizational characteristics are associated with digital dexterity. We argue that in a digital economy where technologies continue to improve exponentially, digital dexterity is the hallmark of a true Digital Organization. In order to build an enterprise for long term digital advantage, executives need to cultivate the unique set of characteristics of a Digital Organization that collectively enable both Digital Capability and Digital Dexterity.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment

What are the jobs of the future? How many will there be? And who will have them? As technology continues to accelerate and machines begin taking care of themselves, fewer people will be necessary. Artificial intelligence is already well on its way to making “good jobs” obsolete: many paralegals, journalists, office workers, and even computer programmers are poised to be replaced by robots and smart software. As progress continues, blue and white collar jobs alike will evaporate, squeezing working- and middle-class families ever further. At the same time, households are under assault from exploding costs, especially from the two major industries—education and health care—that, so far, have not been transformed by information technology. The result could well be massive unemployment and inequality as well as the implosion of the consumer economy itself. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren’t going to work. We must decide, now, whether the future will see broad-based prosperity or catastrophic levels of inequality and economic insecurity. Rise of the Robots is essential reading to understand what accelerating technology means for our economic prospects—not to mention those of our children—as well as for society as a whole.