Managing Digital Transformation
Managing Digital Transformation
Managing Digital Transformation
Scope of Transformation
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SUMMARY
The diffusion of digital technologies has enabled a notable transformation in the
firms’ boundaries, processes, structures, roles, and interactions. It is now clear that
digital transformation is not just a traditional IT back-end process; rather it affects the
organization as a whole, redefining strategies, entrepreneurial processes, innovation,
and governance mechanisms. This permeation has led to the emergence of new ways
of organizing firms’ value chains and interfirm relationships, which now increasingly
occur in digital ecosystems and marketplaces. The scope of transformation as well
as the modalities of value co-generation and delivery are here used to introduce
the content of this Special Issue of California Management Review on Digital
Transformation.
T
he diffusion of digital technologies—for example, Artificial
Intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, digital platforms, virtual
reality (VR), and the like—has enabled a notable transformation
in the firms’ boundaries, processes, structures, roles, and interac-
tions. It is now clear, and widely accepted, that digital transformation is not just
a traditional IT back-end process; rather it affects the organization as a whole,
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6 CALIFORNIA MANAGEMENT REVIEW 62(4)
of technological change turn into different digital mind-sets, and how these dig-
ital mind-sets affect the way employees make sense of and respond to digital
transformation initiatives. Wong and Solberg posit that the different combina-
tions of these individual beliefs are reflected in four types of digital mind-sets:
that is, fixed/expandable digital mind-set, growth/expandable digital mind-set,
fixed/zero-sum digital mind-set, and growth/zero-sum digital mind-set. In fact,
employees’ beliefs reflect the extent to which their technological ability is fixed
versus malleable (resulting in fixed or growth-oriented beliefs), as well as the
extent to which they deem situational resources limited or expandable (resulting
in zero-sum or expandable-sum beliefs). These are in turn connected to different
roles individuals take when facing digital transformation.
Kostis and Ritala analyze how the use of VR-enabled digital artifacts affect
the interactions between co-creators and interpretive uncertainty management.
Kostis and Ritala show how the adoption of VR-enabled digital artifacts alters
managerial practice by supporting co-creation participants to redefine their
boundary roles. They find that the successful incorporation of digital artifacts in
co-creation projects allows professionals to engage in a co-creation process in
which there is less space for misinterpretation—hence, incentives can be better
aligned. This condition lessens the call for complex contracting and scheduled
project check-ups. In this way, firm boundaries become more blurred, as experts
from different firms engage in joint teams run via digital interfaces.
Organizational Design
In the only conceptual piece of this special issue, Kretschmer and
Khashabi develop an integrated picture on how digital transformation affects
organization design. They do this by classifying and analyzing the effect this has
on the process of output creation in firms. The starting assumption is that digital
transformation can alter the way firms define, divide, and group the sub-tasks
required to reach an expected output. For defining and dividing tasks, this out-
come come about via the action of two mechanisms. On one hand, digitalization
processes significantly augment the amount of information available to organiza-
tional decision makers. On the other hand, digital transformation creates a wave
of new critical elements for firm outputs, which leads to demanding new tasks
while turning some of the existing ones outdated. Two core features of this orga-
nizational redesign should be considering interdependencies (including those
with the prospective activities that will be added in the longer term) and decid-
ing where to draw the organizational boundaries around those activities.
Modalities of value
co-generation & delivery
practitioner literature that the strategic scope of the transformation can range from
rewiring existing processes to redefining relationships beyond a company’s own
boundaries in a broader web of interconnected relationships within the legacy
sector or across sectors. We represent this first common theme—“the scope of
the transformation”—as the X axis in Figure 1.
Second, the articles published in this Special Issue highlight different
mechanisms through which companies can engage with their stakeholders to cre-
ate and deliver value, which we call “modalities of value co-generation and deliv-
ery.” On one hand, companies can be contributors to value co-delivery in the
broader new connected economic systems, delivering value through their core,
legacy products. On the other hand, companies can become the “architects” of
entire new value systems by designing and orchestrating ecosystems. These eco-
systems allow the co-creation and delivery of superior value propositions to cus-
tomers through interconnected products and services and through platform
marketplaces, which allow for aggregating multiple offerings (across distinct sec-
tors and market segments) around some centered customer needs. We represent
this second common theme as the Y axis in Figure 1.
At the intersections of the different positions that companies can take on
the X and Y axes, the articles published in this Special Issue contribute to our
understanding of some of the key elements of a company’s digital transformation,
which implies changes in the whole business model.6 Digital transformation
results in three different types of business model transformation: Data-Driven
Processes, Ecosystems, and Platforms.
of a firm’s operations through digital might imply changes in the internal pro-
cesses, these are adaptations typical of any shift of technology. Overall, they hap-
pen within the same management paradigm. Given the inward-focus, this type
of transformation will afford limited options for value co-creation with external
firms (“contributors”). Here, firms might enhance their market competitiveness
since greater efficiency might translate into greater profit margins, and greater
organizational responsiveness might translate in a higher ability to engage with
and retain customers (compared with rivals). However, the firm’s competitive
standing might be quickly eroded to the extent that the industry and the market
evolve rapidly toward new value production and delivery models as a result of a
broader digital transformation at the sector level.
The study by Bjorkdahl shows the limits of focusing on efficiency, running
the business “as is” rather than leveraging digital technologies to redesign the
configuration of value-creation and value-delivery processes in a pursuit of a real
growth and transformation agenda. As the study shows, for some of the leading
European manufacturing firms, the challenge is finding optimal organizational
process configurations to exploit a firm’s competencies and assets with the data
generated from digital technologies.
Correani et al. provide a process for such configurational design, and how
to leverage it to create new business models based on digital-technology-enabled
interdependencies.
Focusing on the specific firm–customer relationship, Guenzi and Habel
show that firms can benefit from digital sales channels to the extent that they
transform the customer-oriented as well as the internal-related processes to create
virtuous feedback loops between engaging and learning from the interactions
with customers.
Leveraging Ecosystems
The second approach to transforming business models is to leverage eco-
systems. Digital technologies can offer new means to collaborate with other
firms, to establish new interfirm routines for sharing information and resources,
and to create collective output that can offer new or enhanced value proposi-
tions to customers. The impact of transformation goes beyond the firm boundar-
ies, affecting the level of complementarities across firms’ activities and products.
Besides changing the logic of value creation, this can lead to increased inter-
connection and interdependence across the set of firms forming the ecosystem.
While firms in the ecosystem are tied by greater interdependence, digital also
affords the member firms greater flexibility, autonomy, and latitude of action. It
allows firms to coordinate their activities without the need to form ad hoc hier-
archical organizational structures (such as joint ventures or alliances). Firms in
the ecosystem act as a collective enterprise with open, permeable boundaries;
digital technologies and digitally enabled interfirm routines offer the new gover-
nance mechanism to regulate interfirm collaborative relationships and incentives
for value production. Kostis and Ritala document how firms can change their
Managing Digital Transformation: Scope of Transformation and Modalities of Value Co-Generation and Delivery 11
Firms should thus consider the scope of the digital transformation along
with the opportunities for value co-creation that the digital-enabled products
and processes provide. The way that these products and services are linked to co-
generate greater consumption experiences and benefits for customers can per-
meate to adjacent industries, leading to industry convergence. As a result, digital
transformation at the market/industry level can unsettle the dominant structural
positions that some firms may have gained in the past, redefining the economic
relationships—and relative power—of firms in the industry.11
Identified management
Paper challenges Identified benefits
Guenzi and Habel • When too many things are • Automated, harmonized,
transformed simultaneously in and prioritized internal
digital transformation, the key processes
challenges are represented • Enhanced services through
by a lack of prioritization digital channels (e.g.,
and unclear organizational chatbot integrated with
responsibility/ownership of the company’s service portal)
digital transformation • Personalized marketing
• A second key challenge is mix
represented by the (re)design
and implementation of a
multi-channel, integrated,
and consistent customer
experience management
strategy
(continued)
14 CALIFORNIA MANAGEMENT REVIEW 62(4)
Identified management
Paper challenges Identified benefits
culture. They are new, because they have to be addressed in a new, different, and
evolving context that keeps on getting transformed by the affordances of digital
technologies—including, for instance, pervasive connectivity, automated decision
making, virtualization, speed of change, and unanticipated product functional-
ities and applications that expand the value options (and thus the opportuni-
ties to explore new revenue and business models). The transformations brought
forward by digital technologies are non-linear, ambiguous, and interact with the
legacy managerial challenges.12 In this context, are our received managerial prin-
ciples still relevant?
At the intersection of the old challenges and the new context, we believe
that the articles in this Special Issue highlight the need to develop new principles
and new tools to grapple with the idiosyncrasies of the digital age, such as
Author Biographies
Carmelo Cennamo is professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at Copenhagen
Business School, where he is Co-Director of the Entrepreneurship Concentration
studies of the MBA Program (email: cce.si@cbs.dk).
Giovanni Battista Dagnino is chair of management and professor of digital strat-
egy at the University of Rome LUMSA—Palermo Campus (email: g.dagnino@
lumsa.it, dagnino@unict.it).
Alberto Di Minin is associate professor of Strategy at the Institute of Management,
Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy, and Research Fellow with the Berkeley
Roundtable on the International Economy (BRIE) at the University of California,
Berkeley (email: alberto.diminin@santannapisa.it).
Gianvito Lanzolla is professor of Strategy at Cass Business School, City, University
of London (email: gianvito.lanzolla.1@city.ac.uk)
Notes
1. See Michael Jacobides, Carmelo Cennamo, and Annabelle Gawer, “Towards a Theory of
Ecosystems,” Strategic Management Journal, 39/8 (August 2018): 2255-2276.
2. See Carmelo Cennamo, “Competing in Digital Markets: A Platform-Based Perspective,”
Academy of Management Perspectives (in press), online July 29, 2019, https://journals.aom.org/
doi/pdf/10.5465/amp.2016.0048.
3. See work by Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani, “Managing Our Hub Economy,” Harvard
Business Review, 95/5 (September/October 2017): 84-92; Gianvito Lanzolla, Danilo Pesce,
and Christopher Tucci, “The Digital Transformation of Search and Recombination in the
Innovation Function: Tensions and an Integrative Framework,” Journal of Product Innovation
Management, forthcoming; Gianvito Lanzolla and Hans T. W. Frankort, “The Online Shadow
of Offline Signals: Which Sellers Get Contacted in Online B2B Marketplaces?” Academy of
Management Journal, 59/1 (February 2016): 207-231.
4. Jonathan L. Zittrain, “The Generative Internet,” Harvard Law Review, 119/7 (May 2006):
1975-2040.
5. For three specific trade-offs in the context of platforms, see Cennamo (2019), op. cit.;
Carmelo Cennamo and Juan Santalo, “How to Avoid Platform Traps,” MIT Sloan Management
Review, 57/1 (Fall 2015): 12-15.
6. Lanzolla and Markides provide an integrative framework of the types of business model
innovation. Gianvito Lanzolla and Constantinos Markides “A Business Model View of
Strategy,” Journal of Management Studies (forthcoming), online April 10, 2020, https://doi.
org/10.1111/joms.12580.
7. For an analysis of how Dallara, a specialized component manufacturer in the sports car
sector, leveraging digital technologies, built an ecosystem for information and knowledge
integration on top of the existing manufacturing value chain structure, see Paolo Aversa,
Carmelo Cennamo, and G. Lorenzoni, “Digital Transformation in Manufacturing Ecosystems:
A Case of Integration Decoupling,” Working Paper. http://ssrn.com/abstract=3646020
16 CALIFORNIA MANAGEMENT REVIEW 62(4)
8. For a complete discussion and theoretical framework, see Cennamo (2019), op. cit.
9. Cennamo (2019), op. cit., p. 7.
10. Cennamo (2019), op. cit., p. 4.
11. For a case of how digital platforms changed the competitive logics in the hospitality industry,
see Carmelo Cennamo, Tim Meyer, and Erdem Dogukan, “Market Architectural Shift: The
Impact of Digital Platforms on Incumbent Firms and The Role of Asset Ownership,” working
paper.
12. See, for example, work by Cennamo et al., op. cit., Lanzolla et al., op. cit.