Sabine Berghaus

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.