Digital Business Vol II: Business Strategy for the Digital Era (3rd Edition)

Welcome to Digital Transformation and Maturity, Volume III in the Digital Business series. This is a thrilling new text on the important and topical subject of digital transformation. It is aimed at practitioners, managers, and other non-technical professionals whose lives are increasingly affected by digital technologies.

The preceding volumes are:

Digital Business Vol I: Introduction to Digital Business & Technology, now in its third edition

Digital Business Vol II: Business Strategy in the Digital Era, now in its third edition

It has become practically axiomatic that technology is a pervasive and accelerating influence on organizations, with wide-reaching impacts on every level of management and business function, from product design and customer experience to human resource management, finance and all other areas of organizational functioning.

However, there are so many unknowns and underdeveloped areas of knowledge within the arenas of digitalization and the fourth industrial revolution. What do these things refer to in the first place? What really are the implications for organizational strategy – does strategy change fundamentally, or rather adapt traditional thinking and models to new realities? How do organizations effectively and correctly transform themselves to these forces, in order to thrive in our new realities? It is these questions that are addressed in the three-book Digital Business series.

This third volume in the series, Digital Transformation and Maturity addresses the back­ground to digital transformation, its context and scope; the desired state of digital maturity; the process to get there, namely digital transformation; and then explores in more depth some of the key factors of what it takes to be digitally mature. The book is organized in three parts as follows:

Part I gives a broad-ranging introduction to digitalization and digital business.

• Chapter 1 discusses core concepts in digitalization, essentially asking the question “what is digitalization”? It presents technological change as a powerful driver of social and economic change over the ages, with digitalization as the most recent and arguably the most dramatic wave of technological change in human history. Digitalization is invariably associated with a number of key trends which are introduced in this chapter and expanded on in detail elsewhere in this book, namely acceleration, convergence, exponential growth patterns, abundance of some things and scarcity of others, and industry concentration.
• Chapter 2 discusses some of the key ingredients for technological change to create truly disruptive change in markets and business. These include the concepts of convergence; the intersection of technological change, social change and business model change; and the drivers of adoption of new technologies;
• Chapter 3 covers various topics regarding how technological and digital disruptions occur and have occurred, ranging from trends on technology and society to organiza­tional and individual trends which help us to predict future technological disruptions.

These three chapters lay the foundation for the subsequent exploration of digital maturity and digital transformation.

Owners of the first volume in this series will note that this Part I is a slightly condensed and updated version of material from Part I that book. We have included this condensed material here in order to serve readers of Vol III who do not own Vol I.

Part II consists of five chapters which lay the foundations for digital transformation and then zoom in to the key topics of digital maturity and digital transformation, in the two central chapters of this book. The chapters comprising Part II cover the following material:

• ‎Chapter 4 outlines the context which makes digital transformation an unavoidable, strategic imperative for organizations, and within which digital transformation proceeds. We review the impact of technological change on society and individuals due to the industrial revolution, with a particular focus on the 3rd and 4th industrial revolutions. The purpose is to highlight the extent of change in the organization’s environmental context, and to help identify and understand some of the key environmental or contextual factors which have to be factored in to the development and execution of digital transformation goals, strategies and execution plans..
• ‎Chapter 5 argues that digital transformation is not only for tech firms but is relevant across all industries, and that it doesn’t only apply to technologists in organizations, but to all parts and all roles within the organization.
• ‎Chapter 6 presents the business case for digital transformation. Given the scope and scale and sheer difficulty of digital transformation, we address why an organization needs to engage in technological transformation? We present six rationales, with a particular focus on the broad strategic rationale, and the strategic outcomes rationale.
• ‎Chapter 7 addresses digital maturity, where we start off by defining digital maturity and clarifying the purpose and terminology relating to models of digital maturity. This lays the foundations for an exploration of the factors and dimensions of digital maturity, as proposed by the popular business and academic literature. Approaches to measuring maturity are then also reviewed. This leads to a proposed unified model for digital maturity.
• ‎Chapter 8 examines the topic of digital transformation. Transformation is, by definition, about change, so the main focus of this chapter is exploring digital transfor­mation as a complex organizational change process. We review a broad body of general management and pre-digital change management theory and practice and relate each of these to digital transformation. We then use this review as a foundation to develop a comprehensive model for managing digital transformation as a complex organizational change process.

 Part III then explores selected factors of digital maturity. We focus here on the factors which comprise the leadership and architecture dimension of digital maturity (see Sections ‎0 and ‎7.7). Given that strategy is the subject of the entire Volume II in this book series we do not devote a chapter in this book to the digital maturity factor of vision and strategy. The other factors of the Leadership and Architecture dimension of digital maturity are covered as follows:

• ‎Chapter 9 presents the case of Zappos, which acts as a capstone case for this part of the book. It highlights multiple factors of digital maturity, most notably digital ethics, organizational structure for digital maturity, digitally aligned culture, customer orientation and engagement and core process digitalisation.
• ‎Chapter 10 argues that digital ethics has become a critical consideration for businesses in the digital era, yet although digital responsibility may be recognized as being hugely important, it is not well understood and systematic models to address it are lacking. The chapter references Armstrong (2024) who explores the key theoretical foundations for digital ethics from its three constituent roots, namely philosophical foundations of ethics, business ethics and technology ethics. We extract from these the implications for digital ethics, in the form of eight necessary factors of digital ethics maturity. The chapter goes on to develop the eight necessary factors of digital ethics maturity in some detail.
• ‎Chapter 11 addresses some key elements of the factor of organization and gover­nance. Specifically, we discuss organizational architecture, which provides a broad tool and canvas for transformation and change projects. We then proceed deeper into organizational structure and systems in the light of digital transformation and change.
• ‎Chapter 12 explores one of the key features of digitally mature organizations – namely organizational agility, which bridges deliberate organizational design elements and organizational culture.
• ‎Chapter 13 explores organizational culture as a critical factor of digital maturity, and especially how to change culture to one in which digital transformation can flourish. Organizational culture is also a key component of organizational architecture and an inescapable determinant of transformation success or failure.
• ‎Chapter 14 explores the factor of innovation and investment architecture, focusing on the key topic lean innovation. The emphasis here is on practical techniques for rapid but well-validated design, business model development, and scaling in the digital era.
• ‎Chapter 15 addresses gamification as a particular strategy for engaging stakeholders (including customers, employees and crowdsource partners) especially in the digital era context. We include this here as an example of the range of techniques which are available to organizations as they digitally transform, and also to illustrate the depth and granularity required for successful digital transformation.

Details

Authors: Brian Armstrong & Gregory John Lee
Publisher: Mercury Books
Format: Paperback
Pages: 570