Theories of Digital Business: summary of articles
Table of Contents
Theories of Digital Business: summary of articles ........................................................................................... 1
Article 1: Weill & Woerner (2015). Thriving in an Increasingly Digital Ecosystem ............................................ 2
Article 2: Edelman & Singer – Competing on Customer Journeys .................................................................... 3
Article 3: Pipelines, platforms, and the new rules of strategy - Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker,
and Sangeet Paul Choudary ............................................................................................................................ 5
Article 4: MIS Quarterly: embracing digital innovation in incumbent firms: how Volvo cars managed
competing concerns - Frederik Svahn, Lars Mathiassen and Rikard Lindgren .................................................. 8
Article 5: IT Governance (Borgman, 2014)..................................................................................................... 14
Article 6: A Wheelbarrow full of frogs: understanding portfolio management for agile projects (Smeekes &
Borgman, 2018) ............................................................................................................................................ 18
Article 7: IT Governance: oil or sand in the wheels of innovation (Arikan & Borgman, 2020)......................... 21
Article 8: Embracing Agile (Rigby, Sutherland & Takeuchi, 2016) .................................................................. 23
Article 9: Success lies in the eye of the beholder: the mismatch between perceived and real IT project
management performance (Rennes, Borgman & Heier, 2016) ...................................................................... 25
Article 10: How the most innovative companies capitalize on today’s rapid-fire strategic challenges – and still
make their numbers (Kotter, 2012)............................................................................................................... 27
Article 11: Resistance to change – the rest of the story (Ford, 2008) ............................................................. 29
Article 12: Making the most of IT governance software – understanding implementation processes (Heier &
Borgman, 2008) ............................................................................................................................................ 32
Article 13: What to expect from Artificial Intelligence (Agrawal & Gans, 2017) ............................................. 35
Article 14: DELTA Plus Model & five stages of analytics maturity: a primer (Davenport, 2018) ...................... 37
Article 15: Process modelling for BPR – event-process chain approach (Young-Gul, 1995) ............................ 39
NotHans 1
,Article 1: Weill & Woerner (2015). Thriving in an Increasingly Digital
Ecosystem
The article presents a framework to help mangers think about their competitive environments in the
digital era. Managers seek to transform in two dimensions; 1) knowing more about their end
customers, 2) and to operate in an increasingly
digital ecosystem.
1. (1) Supplier model: enterprises continue to
digitize, and search becomes easier, therefore
suppliers lose power and are pressured to
continually reduce prices. This results in further
industry consolidation.
2. (2) The Omnichannel model: provide
customers access through multiple channels,
physical and digital channels, giving them greater
choice and seamless experience.
3. (3) Ecosystem driver model: provide a
platform for participants to conduct business.
Like omnichannel businesses, ecosystem drivers
use their brand strength to attract participants,
ensuring a great customer experience and offer
one-stop shopping .
4. (4) The Modular Producer Model: To
survive, must be best in category. To thrive they
need to continue roll out new products and
services to demonstrate they are among the best
options available and best priced.
Companies with ecosystem drivers as dominant model have the highest margins and growth. That is
because they are 1) more responsive to their customer needs and become a 2) destination to sell
their own products as well as others.
To prepare for the future, companies need to develop new capabilities in two areas:
1. Gain better knowledge about consumers through:
• - Enhanced digital capabilities in obtaining info about customer goals
• - Enhance customer in the firm (via customer satisfaction metric)
• - Emphasize evidence based on decision making
• - Develop integrated multi-product and channel customer experience
2. Becoming more of an ecosystem by:
• - Being first choice for customers (through brand promises, world-class execution)
• - Become great at building partners
• - Create service enabled interfaces
• - Treating efficiency and compliance as a competence
NotHans 2
,Article 2: Edelman & Singer – Competing on Customer Journeys
Comments: Paper has very idealistic view. In real life, there are many different privacy and individual
preferences. So why was this paper chosen?
1. Overview of how a company can benefit from big data.
2. Why companies should be able to get all of these people to work together.
Customer journeys need to be stickier:
1. Companies should design journeys in a way that customers won’t even consider leaving the
journey, and therefore stay in the loyalty loop.
2. New journey: compresses the consider step and shortens or/and eliminates the evaluate
step, delivering customers directly into the loyalty loop and locking them within it.
Shift from primarily reactive strategy to aggressive proactive strategy
- Classic: consider -> evaluate -> consider -> buy -> enjoy -> advocate -> bond
- Loyalty loop: buy -> enjoy -> advocate -> bond
Companies building the most effective journeys master four interconnected capabilities:
1. Automation: digitization and streamlining of steps in the journey that were formerly done
manually. This creates the essential for stickier journeys by allowing customers to execute
former complex journey processes quickly and easily.
2. Proactive personalization: companies should take information gleaned either from past
interactions with a customer or from existing sources and use it to instantaneously customize
the shopper’s experience.
3. Contextual interaction: using knowledge about where a customer is in a journey physically
(enter hotel) or virtually (reading product reviews) to draw him forward into the next
interactions.
4. Journey innovation: occurs through ongoing experimentation and active analysis of
customer needs, technologies, and services in order to spot opportunities to extend the
relationship with the customer. Goal is to identify new sources of value for both the company
and consumers.
Today, winning brands owe their success not just to the quality and value of what they sell, but to
the superiority of the journey that they create.
Capabilities in practice
1. Use of API to pull data from other providers to assemble a picture of the customer.
2. Creating customer dashboards for production and use.
3. Integrate services with home-management networks to automate energy conservation.
4. Create conservation-oriented customer communities.
Building successful journeys:
- Chief Experience: guide the decision on journey investments and customer segments to
focus on, he prioritizes current journeys for digital development and spots opportunities for
new ones.
- Journey product managers: at the centre of the action. People in this role are economic and
creative stewards. Their job is to understand how customers move through the journey.
Main goal is to extend the journey and increase its stickiness and value.
- Scrum teams: execution-oriented, agile and fast in testing improvements. They understand
the needs and wants and use prototyping and customer-use data to measure the impact on
customer behaviour. They are brought together by journey managers for design sprints in
which they pitch new paths.
NotHans 3
, NotHans
4
Table of Contents
Theories of Digital Business: summary of articles ........................................................................................... 1
Article 1: Weill & Woerner (2015). Thriving in an Increasingly Digital Ecosystem ............................................ 2
Article 2: Edelman & Singer – Competing on Customer Journeys .................................................................... 3
Article 3: Pipelines, platforms, and the new rules of strategy - Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker,
and Sangeet Paul Choudary ............................................................................................................................ 5
Article 4: MIS Quarterly: embracing digital innovation in incumbent firms: how Volvo cars managed
competing concerns - Frederik Svahn, Lars Mathiassen and Rikard Lindgren .................................................. 8
Article 5: IT Governance (Borgman, 2014)..................................................................................................... 14
Article 6: A Wheelbarrow full of frogs: understanding portfolio management for agile projects (Smeekes &
Borgman, 2018) ............................................................................................................................................ 18
Article 7: IT Governance: oil or sand in the wheels of innovation (Arikan & Borgman, 2020)......................... 21
Article 8: Embracing Agile (Rigby, Sutherland & Takeuchi, 2016) .................................................................. 23
Article 9: Success lies in the eye of the beholder: the mismatch between perceived and real IT project
management performance (Rennes, Borgman & Heier, 2016) ...................................................................... 25
Article 10: How the most innovative companies capitalize on today’s rapid-fire strategic challenges – and still
make their numbers (Kotter, 2012)............................................................................................................... 27
Article 11: Resistance to change – the rest of the story (Ford, 2008) ............................................................. 29
Article 12: Making the most of IT governance software – understanding implementation processes (Heier &
Borgman, 2008) ............................................................................................................................................ 32
Article 13: What to expect from Artificial Intelligence (Agrawal & Gans, 2017) ............................................. 35
Article 14: DELTA Plus Model & five stages of analytics maturity: a primer (Davenport, 2018) ...................... 37
Article 15: Process modelling for BPR – event-process chain approach (Young-Gul, 1995) ............................ 39
NotHans 1
,Article 1: Weill & Woerner (2015). Thriving in an Increasingly Digital
Ecosystem
The article presents a framework to help mangers think about their competitive environments in the
digital era. Managers seek to transform in two dimensions; 1) knowing more about their end
customers, 2) and to operate in an increasingly
digital ecosystem.
1. (1) Supplier model: enterprises continue to
digitize, and search becomes easier, therefore
suppliers lose power and are pressured to
continually reduce prices. This results in further
industry consolidation.
2. (2) The Omnichannel model: provide
customers access through multiple channels,
physical and digital channels, giving them greater
choice and seamless experience.
3. (3) Ecosystem driver model: provide a
platform for participants to conduct business.
Like omnichannel businesses, ecosystem drivers
use their brand strength to attract participants,
ensuring a great customer experience and offer
one-stop shopping .
4. (4) The Modular Producer Model: To
survive, must be best in category. To thrive they
need to continue roll out new products and
services to demonstrate they are among the best
options available and best priced.
Companies with ecosystem drivers as dominant model have the highest margins and growth. That is
because they are 1) more responsive to their customer needs and become a 2) destination to sell
their own products as well as others.
To prepare for the future, companies need to develop new capabilities in two areas:
1. Gain better knowledge about consumers through:
• - Enhanced digital capabilities in obtaining info about customer goals
• - Enhance customer in the firm (via customer satisfaction metric)
• - Emphasize evidence based on decision making
• - Develop integrated multi-product and channel customer experience
2. Becoming more of an ecosystem by:
• - Being first choice for customers (through brand promises, world-class execution)
• - Become great at building partners
• - Create service enabled interfaces
• - Treating efficiency and compliance as a competence
NotHans 2
,Article 2: Edelman & Singer – Competing on Customer Journeys
Comments: Paper has very idealistic view. In real life, there are many different privacy and individual
preferences. So why was this paper chosen?
1. Overview of how a company can benefit from big data.
2. Why companies should be able to get all of these people to work together.
Customer journeys need to be stickier:
1. Companies should design journeys in a way that customers won’t even consider leaving the
journey, and therefore stay in the loyalty loop.
2. New journey: compresses the consider step and shortens or/and eliminates the evaluate
step, delivering customers directly into the loyalty loop and locking them within it.
Shift from primarily reactive strategy to aggressive proactive strategy
- Classic: consider -> evaluate -> consider -> buy -> enjoy -> advocate -> bond
- Loyalty loop: buy -> enjoy -> advocate -> bond
Companies building the most effective journeys master four interconnected capabilities:
1. Automation: digitization and streamlining of steps in the journey that were formerly done
manually. This creates the essential for stickier journeys by allowing customers to execute
former complex journey processes quickly and easily.
2. Proactive personalization: companies should take information gleaned either from past
interactions with a customer or from existing sources and use it to instantaneously customize
the shopper’s experience.
3. Contextual interaction: using knowledge about where a customer is in a journey physically
(enter hotel) or virtually (reading product reviews) to draw him forward into the next
interactions.
4. Journey innovation: occurs through ongoing experimentation and active analysis of
customer needs, technologies, and services in order to spot opportunities to extend the
relationship with the customer. Goal is to identify new sources of value for both the company
and consumers.
Today, winning brands owe their success not just to the quality and value of what they sell, but to
the superiority of the journey that they create.
Capabilities in practice
1. Use of API to pull data from other providers to assemble a picture of the customer.
2. Creating customer dashboards for production and use.
3. Integrate services with home-management networks to automate energy conservation.
4. Create conservation-oriented customer communities.
Building successful journeys:
- Chief Experience: guide the decision on journey investments and customer segments to
focus on, he prioritizes current journeys for digital development and spots opportunities for
new ones.
- Journey product managers: at the centre of the action. People in this role are economic and
creative stewards. Their job is to understand how customers move through the journey.
Main goal is to extend the journey and increase its stickiness and value.
- Scrum teams: execution-oriented, agile and fast in testing improvements. They understand
the needs and wants and use prototyping and customer-use data to measure the impact on
customer behaviour. They are brought together by journey managers for design sprints in
which they pitch new paths.
NotHans 3
, NotHans
4
