From AI to digital transformation: The AI readiness framework

Strategies and means for selecting and implementing digital technologies that realize firms’ goals in digital transformation have been extensively investigated. The recent surge in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has amplified the need for such investigation, as they are being increasingly used in diverse organizational practices, creating not only new opportunities for digital transformation but also new challenges for managers of digital transformation processes. In this article, I present a framework intended to assist efforts to address one of the first of these challenges: assessment of organizational AI readiness—that is, an organization’s ability to deploy AI technologies to enable digital transformation, in four key dimensions: technologies, activities, boundaries, and goals. I show that this framework can facilitate analysis both of an organization’s current sociotechnical AI status and of the prospects for the technology’s fuller value-adding, sociotechnical deployment. The AI readiness framework invites fuller theorizing of the roles that AI can—and will—play in digital transformation.     

From disruptively digital to proudly analog: A holistic typology of digital transformation strategies

Recently booming academic interest in digital transformation aims to provide continuous support to managers in dealing with this important issue. However, as with all new fields, the scholarly literature is characterized by increased variability and diversity of topics covered, constructs used, and the relationships between them, resulting in an unclear and blurry understanding of the whole of digital transformation. Our article closes this gap by identifying distinctive digital transformation strategies in terms of two critical dimensions: usage of digital technologies and readiness of a business model for digital operation. The result is a typology of four generic digital transformation strategies that essentially differ in the primary motivation and target of transformation, leadership style, importance of skills like creativity and entrepreneurial spirit among employees, risks and challenges faced in the process, consequences of potential failure, and available tactics for improvement. By providing heuristics and a systematic basis for comparison of different strategies, it is our belief that the proposed framework will be useful to researchers and managers responsible for and interested in digital transformation.     

Digital transformation: Five recommendations for the digitally conscious firm

Digital transformation is one of the key challenges facing contemporary businesses. The need to leverage digital technology to develop and implement new business models forces firms to reevaluate existing capabilities, structures, and culture in order to identify what technologies are relevant and how they will be enacted in organizational processes and business offerings. More often than not, these profound changes require firms to revisit old truths as they develop strategies that thread the needle between beneficial innovation and harmful disruption. This article uses the Internet of Things (IoT) as a backdrop to demonstrate the concerns associated with transformative technologies and offers five recommendations as to how firms can develop the strategies needed for digital transformation and become digitally conscious: (1) Start small and build on firsthand benefits; (2) team up and create competitive advantage from brand recognition; (3) engage in standardization efforts; (4) take responsibility for data ownership and ethics; and (5) own the change and ensure organization-wide commitment. As such, this article shows that digital transformation should be a top management priority and a defining trait of corporate business strategy, and that by becoming digitally conscious, firms may get a head start on their transformation journey.     

Creating an innovative digital project team: Levers to enable digital transformation

Digital transformation encompasses an organization's ability to adapt, respond, and position itself for success in the face of rapid technology evolution. A critical structure in achieving successful digital transformation is the digital project team, yet there is little research on how they are created and developed. Much of the focus has been on agile methodologies and processes but there is less research to inform organizations on digital team dynamics such as roles, empowerment, learning, and leadership development. This article describes our findings from a multilevel study of the IT function of 60 companies, including fieldwork at five company sites involving more than 130 semistructured interviews with senior level IT professionals. We identify four essential team-based levers that enable digital transformation: (1) diverse and targeted team composition, (2) iterative goal setting, (3) continuous learning, and (4) talent management. Using company examples and practices, we describe how digital leaders are using these levers to propel their organizations forward in the journey toward digital transformation.     

The impact of digital transformation on the retailing value chain

Consumers have traditionally made purchase decisions at the store shelf, giving institutional brick-and-mortar retailers great power to learn about and influence behaviors and preferences. With the rise of e-commerce, mobile shopping, and most recently smart technologies, new competitors threaten this long-standing supremacy. Adopting a value-creation perspective, we analyze how digitization started the erosion of institutional retailing as the primary interface to the customer. We develop a framework that identifies five new sources of value creation and propose how these advance and transform competition for this interface. Depending on the importance of the new sources of value creation (in different purchase situations), stationary retailing may prevail as an important interaction point in a multichannel decision journey. However, increasing diffusion of branded-product platforms including connected devices and online retail platforms is shifting this authority to new players. For the parties involved in this multilayered competition, acknowledging the changes and actively managing their position in the evolving eco-systems is crucial.     

Building an organizational digital twin

The increasing digitization of the economy means that a new digital resource—a digital twin of an organization—is now feasible. We suggest five principles that assist in the construction of an organizational digital twin and show how they combine into a dynamic evolutionary process that builds and maintains the digital twin incrementally. We also discuss the organizational implications of implementing a digital twin and how digital twins create value in an organization.     

数字经济时代中小企业的数字化转型研究

以5G、大数据、人工智能、云计算、AR/VR、区块链等为代表的新一代信息技术正在日益成为全球经济发展的重要驱动力。在数字经济发展中,中小企业是不可忽视的重要主体。本文基于文献和案例研究,认为数字经济时代广泛的数字化转型正在重构产业生态,中小企业面临实现规模经济、拓展应用场景的新机遇,并提出加快中小企业数字化转型的措施建议,以期为相关实践和理论研究提供参考。     

Competing in digital ecosystems

Digital technologies are revolutionizing traditional interdependencies among businesses. As a result, managers have begun to recognize their business environments as digital ecosystems. For firms accustomed to framing their business environments as industries, this represents a significant shift in perspective—one that requires an understanding of fresh strategic initiatives necessary to compete in the digital era. In this article, we highlight what is new and different about digital ecosystems for firm strategy. We offer frameworks that explain how digital ecosystems provide firms with new sources of value and new avenues for growth. Two sets of underlying concepts govern these frameworks: (1) production and consumption ecosystems and (2) digital envelopes and product-in-use information. We introduce and elaborate upon these foundational concepts and highlight new strategic options for firms to compete in digital ecosystems.     

Digital power: Value chain upgrading in an age of digitization

We investigate whether and how digitization may affect the power relationships that constrain the upgrading of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in global value chains (GVCs). Combining GVC literature and Resource Dependency Theory, we examine the three features that shift upgrading constraints: asset-specificity, market disintermediation, and innovation sources. The outcomes of a multiple case study encompassing Brazilian firms intentionally sampled from the Digital Games Industry refine our propositions, leading to the concept of digital power as the potential difference in the power imbalance that a supplier may experience in relation to lead firms when performing similar functions in value chains with different digitization degrees. We contribute to International Business literature regarding the relatively unaddressed effects of digital technologies on power relationships in value chains, and deepen the extant understanding of value chain upgrading as a phenomenon. For practitioners, our results inform ways of benefiting from digital industries.     

Managing for competency with innovation change in higher education: Examining the pitfalls and pivots of digital transformation

Digital transformation recently converged on organizations as a new paradigm—a must-have exemplar—to enable competitive advantage. While the effects of digital transformation and their analytics, along with platform technologies, are becoming pronounced in companies, there is still a need to examine their implications on higher education. In light of the dynamics of digital transformation, how can higher education better manage the shift toward newer competencies and the need for innovation presented by the emergence of digital technologies? In this article, I examine the issues around the need for this balance—often defined in strategy as ambidexterity, or the need to address both competency with innovation—by outlining the historical trajectories that led to this problem in higher education, identifying three common pitfalls that higher education programs and administrators face, and tying these issues to higher education’s absorptive capacity. To resolve these pitfalls, this article builds upon absorptive capacity frameworks for education practitioners and strategies as a prospective change management tool.     

The digitalization triumvirate: How incumbents survive

In an era of increasing technological transformation, the lines among industries, competitors, and companies are blurring as firms and platforms combine to create unique methods for engagement. Survival and growth in a rapidly changing marketplace require incumbent companies to divest themselves of legacy thinking and to embrace internal innovation that adds value for both channel members and customers. This entails understanding the mechanisms of process digitalization, communications digitalization, and buyer digitalization. It requires incumbent firms to build and innovate on strengths currently possessed in-house and to identify and cover resource gaps. Incumbents also must work to overcome organizational inertia and effectively implement an agile approach for digitalization across the company, channels, and customer triumvirate. In sum, incumbents must: (1) consider and embrace gains from the digitalization of process, communications, and buyer; (2) respect the core business while recognizing that elements of the existing business model must adapt to changing channels and customer expectations; and (3) recognize that digitalization comes in many forms with multiple applications.     

Tortoise,not the hare: Digital transformation of supply chain business processes

With the rapid development of digital technologies, many supply chain professionals are wondering how to move forward. Three technologies are poised to change supply chain business processes: robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML) and blockchain. Based on interviews with supply chain professionals in 14 large, mature manufacturing and service organizations, we outline the promise of each technology and forecast their broad-scale adoption potential. Organizations should take the following measures to ensure their readiness to adopt and effectively use one or more of these technologies: (1) identify a supply chain technology visionary who can lead through the maze of technologies and the changing digital landscape, (2) develop a digital technology roadmap for their supply chain processes, and (3) update foundational information systems.     

Rethinking corporate governance in the digital economy: The role of stewardship

Digital technologies are increasingly changing the nature of competition and generating externalities that impact society. On the one hand, digitalization allows organizations to create substantial economic value in shorter periods of time through improved economies of scale, scope, and learning, resulting is increasing returns on capital and competitive concentration. On the other hand, ensuing societal concerns with inequities, regulatory lapses, and lack of transparency and truthfulness represent significant challenges for effective corporate governance. This article addresses the consequences to stakeholders that emerge from the digital economy, discussing how traditional governance mechanisms are ill-equipped to subvert negative externalities. We offer a stewardship-based model of corporate governance as a solution to the pressing problems plaguing consumers, employees, and other salient stakeholders of digital business excesses, with an emphasis on truthful disclosures, enhanced transparency, improvements in equitable allocation of organizational resources, and heightened trust relationships. The focus is on the positive role that organizational leaders can play as exemplars of virtuous stewardship in a highly networked society. The article redefines a modern view of stewardship in a digital economy and applies its principles to the four Ts of virtuous stewardship, a practical corporate governance model that encompasses truthfulness, transparency, trust, and technological equity.     

New Technology Adoption,Business Strategy and Government Involvement: The Case of Mobile Commerce

SUMMARY

This research focuses on understanding how business organizations are likely to adopt mobile commerce (m-commerce) technology. Mobile commerce adoption represents a complex process that draws in variables external to the firm such as the environment in which the business operates and the government involvement, as well as variables internal to the company such as its business strategy and its organizational culture. A model is formulated and several research propositions are offered. They will help understand the mobile commerce applications adoption process. Implications of this model and further research avenues are discussed.     

工艺信息数字化的特点及关键技术

本文对工艺信息数字化在信息化制造中的地位和作用进行了分析，介绍了工艺信息数字化技术的现状及发展趋势，并在此基础上论述了工艺信息数字化的五项特点及其三个关键技术。     

程控交换机全数字音信号及多频信号设计方法

本文以新型数字交换机系统为背景,提出了全数字音信号和多频互控信号的设计方法。讨论了电路原理、编码方式,电平设计和脉冲信号的时序关系。最后给出了电原理图和试验数据结果。     

Born internationals: Market expansion and business operation mode strategies in the digital media field

This paper examines leading Swedish and Finnish Internet consultancies operating in the digital media service field. These are ‘born international’ firms that internationalise their business at an exceptionally rapid pace. The paper focuses on why and to what extent the market expansion and business operation mode strategies of these companies deviate from the traditional pattern depicted by the Scandinavian process school. The empirical data consisted of interviews with the founder and senior management and secondary data from company and public archives. The research findings show that in fact both the international new venture research and the Scandinavian internationalisation model appear to be valid. The former model was evidenced by the fact that the born internationals indeed deviated from the behaviour of the traditional firms. The latter was exemplified by the fact that the final internationalisation profile, after the withdrawals of firms from unsuccessful markets, was close to what the Scandinavian internationalisation model would call ‘rational’ expansion. Hence, if the investigation period is long enough to account for unsuccessful endeavours and withdrawals, we may then find empirical support for the traditional model as well. To be reliable, the investigation period should cover at least one economic slow down.     

自适应数字回波抵消

本文阐述了解决通信系统中回波问题而提出的一种较完善的数据驱动自适应回波抵消器的结构及性能。分析了相位抖动、频率漂移及偏值等问题对抵消器性能的影响。