Management and Information Technology after Digital Transformation

Peter Ekman, Peter Dahlin, Christina Keller, Peter Ekman, Peter Dahlin, Christina Keller

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000451665
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Commerce
• Categoria: Gestion de l'information

With the widespread transformation of information into digital form throughout society – firms and organisations are embracing this development to adopt multiple types of IT to increase internal efficiency and to achieve external visibility and effectiveness – we have now reached a position where there is data in abundance and the challenge is to manage and make use of it fully. This book addresses this new managerial situation, the post-digitalisation era, and offers novel perspectives on managing the digital landscape.

The topics span how the post-digitalisation era has the potential to renew organisations, markets and society. The chapters of the book are structured in three topical sections but can also be read individually. The chapters are structured to offer insights into the developments that take place at the intersection of the management, information systems and computer science disciplines. It features more than 70 researchers and managers as collaborating authors in 23 thought-provoking chapters.

Written for scholars, researchers, students and managers from the management, information systems and computer science disciplines, the book presents a comprehensive and thought-provoking contribution on the challenges of managing organisations and engaging in global markets when tools, systems and data are abundant.

1 Perspectives on management and information technology after digital transformation

Peter Ekman, Peter Dahlin and Christina Keller

DOI: 10.4324/9781003111245-1

Information technology (IT) has had profound effects on people, organisations and society at large, and the solutions it brings have evolved from requiring specialist handling to being accessible to the majority of the population and being used regularly in everyday life. Over the decades, the spotlight has been on different forms of IT, which has developed from e-mail and the worldwide web being novelties at one point in time to the current frontier with artificial intelligence and big data. Views related to the effect of digitalisation on businesses range from a “silver bullet,” promising revolutionary results, to claims that digitalisation has had very little impact on business. For example, the article “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate” by Michael Hammer, which was published in the Harvard Business Review in 1990, points out that efficient digitalisation is not just about letting IT automate existing routines. Rather, companies should use the capabilities offered by IT to transform their business processes. His article can be seen as an early contribution to the idea of Business Process Reengineering, which emphasises the enabling effects of digitalisation and was adopted by many organisations in the 1990s. Around the turn of the new century and following the financial crisis, many organisations became strongly cost-oriented and resulted in digitalisation being considered primarily as a cost rather than a strategic benefit and source of competitive advantage. For instance, Nicholas Carr’s (2003) article, entitled “IT Doesn’t Matter,” also published in the Harvard Business Review, argues that organisations should not seek to be IT leaders; rather, they should invest in already well-established IT solutions and adopt a “follow, don’t lead logic.”

In the past few decades, we have witnessed consolidation of global IT firms, greater reliance on cloud solutions and virtualisation and increased sophistication of technologies being adopted and used in organisations. These changes can be described as the result of digital transformation. Digitalisation can be defined as “a sociotechnical process of applying digitising techniques to broader social and institutional contexts that render digital technologies infrastructural” (Tilson et al. 2010: 749). Legner et al. (2017: 301) distinguish between digitalisation and digitisation: “While digitization puts emphasis on digital technologies, the term digitalization has been coined to describe the manifold sociotechnical phenomena and processes of adopting and using these technologies in broader individual, organizational, and societal contexts.” Various forms of digitalisation have been steadily implemented since the global recession around the millennium. The importance of digitalisation has been underlined and the process has intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic, as a result of the restrictions on social interaction and travel (Financial Times 2020).

Evidence of digitalisation can be seen almost everywhere, but its long-term effects remain difficult to fully grasp. It is not difficult to see that digitalisation has changed our everyday lives through the provision of new innovative services (Barrett et al. 2015), restructuring of both national and international infrastructures (e.g., the travel and banking industries; Sharma et al. 2020; Worthington and Welch 2011) and the opening up of education systems through massive open online courses (MOOCs; Martin 2012). How we interact with one another has changed due to the use of smartphones and social media (Alaimo et al. 2020), and smart homes are providing new opportunities for how we live and how society is structured (Shin et al. 2018). At the same time, digitalisation has changed the way organisations are structured (Baptista et al. 2020) and how professional activities are performed (Sennett 1999), and has promoted the development of new business models (Kavadias et al. 2016). While the effects of digitalisation on people and their homes are very evident, its effects on organisations can be less visible but are subject of much academic research.

This book is a result of continuous research by and recurrent discussion among researchers active at the intersection of the management and information systems disciplines, who are interested in the effects of digitalisation on management practice and theory. Researchers have always been fascinated by new phenomena and have an ongoing interest in evidence of change. Organisations are in a state of constant flux – including incorporation of various IT – and this constant change needs to be acknowledged (Gaskin et al. 2014). In management-oriented research, cross-sectional studies as well as longitudinal studies are used to create an understanding of the history, the present and the future. The chapters in this edited collection are based on work conducted by over 60 researchers, who are jointly reflecting on and drawing insights from their ongoing research into the integration of management practices with IT, which is both a cause and an effect of digital transformation. Despite some outstanding progress, this transformation is far from complete. Therefore, rather than focusing on the process of digitalisation, our intention, in this book, is to highlight the opportunities and challenges that accompany or follow digital transformation. Regardless of whether digital transformation is seen as an enabler or a cost, its potential value and benefits depend on entrepreneurial and well-managed integration with the organisation and its goals.

The chapters in this book work to condense the researchers’ insights into how digitalisation has changed, and is changing, organisations, their markets, and the society at large. Some chapters discuss what is causing organisations to lag in this development and why some would like to withdraw from the digitalised world. Taken together, the chapters in this book offer a smorgasbord of perspectives on and insights into the management of IT after digital transformation. They cover multiple industries and span across the individual, organisational and societal levels. They show that the digitalised landscape is no longer an unexplored territory but one that presents a variety of experiences, opportunities and challenges for individuals, organisations and societies.

The book is organised into three sections, and the chapters in each section have a common theme. Each chapter is aimed at inspiring managerial thinking, providing insights into digitalisation and its potential transformative effects and suggesting directions for future research. The chapters in this book should be appreciated by professionals searching for a fresh perspective on managerial practices, MBA students working on their capstone projects and graduate students preparing for a career in the frontline of digital transformation. The chapters in this book do not need to be read sequentially; each is written as a stand-alone text. To emphasise the managerial perspective, each chapter concludes with a short takeaway section that summarises the implications.

To start this collection of insightful texts, we invited Alan Brown, Professor in Digital Economy at the University of Exeter, to reflect on the challenges and opportunities organisations face through and after digital transformation. Chapter 2 “Digital transformation: towards a new perspective for large established organisations in a digital age” frames the topic in an excellent way and should make the reader well prepared for a continued dive into different perspectives on management and information technology after digital transformation. It is followed by three parts focusing on (1) the transformation of society and markets as a result of digitalisation, (2) managerial and organisational challenges related to digitalisation and (3) framing digitalisation.

1.1 Part 1 – The transformation of society and markets

The section starts with Chapter 3 “Managing digital servitization: a service ecosystem perspective,” by David Sörhammar, Bård Tronvoll and Christian Kowalkowski. The authors suggest that digitalisation should be seen as taking place in ecosystems, which require firms to manage both weak and strong relationships with other actors. Thus, digitalisation affects value creation among stakeholders, which is best understood from a systemic perspective. Chapter 4 “Caught on the platform or jumping onto the digital train: challenges for industries lagging behind in digitalisation” is by Peter Ekman, Magnus Berglind and Steven Thompson and discusses the reasons why some industries are lagging in terms of digitalisation. Chapter 5 “Digitalisation for sustainability: conceptualisation, implications and future research directions” by Elena Anastasiadou, Linda Alkire and Jimmie Röndell argues that digitalisation and sustainability should be linked in order to achieve the highest potential value and highest market transformation potential. Kevin Walther and David Sörhammar offer a retrospective odyssey through the gaming industry and discuss the close relationship between technological and business model innovations in Chapter 6 “Reaching new heights in the cloud: the digital transformation of the video games industry.” Chapters 7–9 suggest that the dominant view of labour in modern markets needs to be updated. Chapter 7 by Christoffer Andersson, Lucia Crevani, Anette Hallin, Caroline Ingvarsson, Chris Ivory, Inti Lammi, Eva Lindell, Irina Popova and Anna Uhlin is entitled “Hyper-Taylorism and third-order technologies: making sense of the transformation of work and management in a post-digital era.” Chapter 8 entitled “Why space is not enough: service innovation and service delivery in senior housing” is by Petter Ahlström, Göran Lindahl, Markus Fellesson, Börje Bjelke and Fredrik Nilsson and discusses how digitalisation allows seniors to become co-creators of their own well-being. In a similar context, Chapter 9 by Ann Svensson, Linda Bergkvist, Charlotte Bäccman and Susanne Durst, entitled “Challenges in implementing digital assistive technology in municipal healthcare” concludes Part 1 by discussing digitalisation in the context of healthcare.

1.2 Part 2 – Managerial and organisational challenges

The second section elaborates on the managerial and organisational challenges that emerge after digital transformation. It is introduced by Klas Sundberg, Birger Rapp and Christina Keller in Chapter 10 “Modern project management: challenges for the future” where they argue about the need for new project management methods that can adapt to a situation of rapid technological change and flexibility. They discuss how traditional and more modern (agile) project management methods can be combined into hybrid methods, as a means to deal with the needs of contemporary digitalisation. Chapter 11 “Managing the paradoxes of digital product innovation” by Fredrik Svahn and Bendik Bygstad examines how product innovation practices must go hand in hand with digital innovation, which they concede is a difficult task. In Chapter 12 “When external reporting goes social: new conditions for transparency and accountability?” Cecilia Gullberg elaborates on how the characteristics of accounting, which, traditionally, have been periodic, holistic and historical, are changing to become continuous, fragmented and forward-looking. These changes are being promoted by use of social media which are having an effect on transparency and accountability. Chapter 13 “Robotic process automation and the accounting profession’s extinction prophecy,” written by Matthias Holmstedt, Fredrik Jeanson and Angelina Sundström, addresses the transformation of the accounting profession as the digital transformation progresses. Chapter 14 “Managing digital employee-driven innovation: the role of middle-level managers and ambidextrous leadership” by Izabelle Bäckström and Peter Magnusson analyses the factors for success or failure in the process of integrating idea management systems to deal with employee’s ideas about new products and services. In Chapter 15, “Digital gamification of organisational functions and emergent management practices,” Edward Gillmore presents the case of gamification whose introduction changed the managerial practices in an organisation. Part 2 concludes with Chapter 16 “Leveraging digital technologies in Enterprise Risk Management” by Jason Crawford and Jan Lindvall who argue that, by leveraging digital technologies to enhance risk computation, interpretation and coordination, enterprise risk management can play a valuable business partnering role in the organisations.

1.3 Part 3 – Framing digitalisation

Part 3 includes chapters that discuss different ways to frame digitalisation and its transformative effects. It starts with Chapter 17 “The end of business intelligence and business analytics” by Matthias Holmstedt and Peter Dahlin, who discuss how the concepts of “business intelligence” and “business analytics” have become obsolete and are limiting organisations’ creation of value using analytics, after digital transformation. In Chapter 18 “‘Deleted User’: signalling digital disenchantment in the post-digital society,” Cristina Ghita, Claes Thorén and Martin Stojanov observe the “r/nosurf” community and derive some lessons related to how humans might react to the agency challenges raised by digitalisation. Henrik Dellestrand, Olof Lindahl and Jakob Westergren in Chapter 19 “The role of boundary-spanners in the post-digitalised multinational corporation” discuss the effects of digitalisation on the role played by individuals or units in multinational corporations that act as boundary-spanners and facilitate knowledge transfer within and beyond the organisation. Chapter 20 “The effec...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Foreword
• 1 Perspectives on management and information technology after digital transformation
• 2 Digital transformation: towards a new perspective for large established organisations in a digital age
• Part 1 The transformation of society and markets
• Part 2 Managerial and organisational challenges
• Part 3 Framing digitalisation
• Index