Sabine Berghaus

The dynamic proliferation of digital technologies challenges organizations to adapt their business models, products and processes to the new digital reality. The digital transformation of organizations is a disruptive process that decision makers strategically develop and actively carry out. Based on a literature review, qualitative interviews and two focus groups, this study proposes a maturity model that allows a holistic view on the areas affected by digital transformation. The model consists of nine dimensions that consist of a criteria list with 59 indicators. The contribution of this study enables practitioners to assess their activities associated with the digital business transformation and presents further areas of research.

A new generation of mobile IT is driving new thinking and innovation in most areas of organizations and is challenging corporate IT. From a "computing" perspective, this second-generation enterprise mobility (SGEM), such as smartphones and media tablets, enables pervasiveness, much more intuitive computing, and contextual intelligence. This changes what can be done with IT in enterprises and creates new challenges for IT departments. Based on three group interviews and twelve individual interviews including data from 31 corporations, we explore how corporations are responding to SGEM. Based on this data, we derive three opportunities and four challenges. The synthesis of the results reveals that SGEM has changed employee expectations for professional IT and led to fundamental issues concerning the role and objectives of corporate IT departments. The results contribute to a more holistic picture of corporate usage of SGEM and illustrate how the new perception of IT is challenging common practice. An earlier version of this paper has previously been published in the Proceedings of the Nineteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems (Sammer, Brechbühl, & Back, 2013).

Digital transformation poses critical challenges to organizations. The initial phase – the “fuzzy front-end“– in such a profound innovation process is often perceived as ill-defined and chaotic, yet it may have great impact on the outcome. However, managers struggle with initiating this process and prioritizing between different activities. Prior research has pointed out the importance of a digital transformation strategy, however, less emphasis is put on the activities that enact this strategy. Drawing on qualitative data from eleven organizations with an ongoing digital transformation program and by employing activity theory, we delineate nine patterns of typical activities in the beginning of digital transformation. The prioritization of these activities reveals five approaches – centralized, bottom-up, IT-centered, innovation-centered, and channel centered. The results contribute to a better understanding of the initial phases of digital transformation for practitioners and complement prior research on digital transformation strategy with deeper insights on typical activities and approaches.

Managers and decision makers need to transform their organizational routines and structures to meet the challenges of the digital age. Even though organizational change is by no means a new topic, many companies struggle to recognize and make sense of the often very disruptive changes affecting all industries. In order to foster an understanding of the phenomenon and the development of a digital transformation strategy, this research derives typical stages in a digital business transformation process from empirical data. The nine dimensions of the digital maturity model (DMM) provide a more profound understanding of the relevant levers for managing digital transformation. The DMM was implemented together with a survey of 547 individuals from 417 organizations in Switzerland and Germany. Based on the survey data, we used the Rasch-algorithm and cluster analysis to derive five maturity stages. The findings show that while digital affinity and experimenting with digital technology are already prevalent in companies, a strategically planned transformation and usage of advanced data analytics in business processes are less common. The results from this study yield insights into how activities in digital business transformation are currently tackled and prioritized and thus con-tribute to the body of knowledge about organizational transformation.

With the increasing popularity of wearable technology, companies have been evaluating if wearable devices are relevant to them. In the context of a project in the automotive industry, we set out to assess user requirements for successful application of wearable devices in connection with the vehicle. In order to identify user requirements relevant for our research, we (1) reviewed existing literature to extract requirements already discovered in previous research; (2) we conducted a market analysis in order to gain an overview on functionalities and use cases of current wearable devices; (3) we developed customer journeys as a tool for the focus group and the development of utilization scenarios; (4) we tested our findings in a focus group, and (5) developed five utilization scenarios for in-car use of wearable devices. Results show that key requirements for users are contextual intelligence, making use of sensory input and connectivity, anticipation of user needs, unobtrusiveness, and compatibility with other devices and operating systems.

Companies which create mobile business solutions require users to adopt them in order to create value for the organization. However, when mobile devices enter the workplace, companies themselves face an adoption process, in having to integrate these devices into the existing IT infrastructure. In this research project, we conducted a focus group with subsequent expert interviews, following a grounded theory approach. We identified seven drivers of mobile business solution adoption in an organizational context: mobile user experience, social influence, time to market, security, workplace flexibility, information availability and process mobilization. While these factors facilitate adoption for some users, they create challenges for or require strategic decisions from other organizational stakeholders, such as internal users, operating departments and corporate IT. The adoption factors and implications for organizational stakeholders were compiled in a conceptual framework.