Driving digital transformation: integrative insights on organizational, environmental and managerial drivers

Given the prevalence and ubiquity of digital technologies in organizations’ transformation, it is of great importance to understand the drivers of digital transformation. This dissertation contributes to this line of research by examining three relevant organizational, environmental, and managerial drivers and offering novel insights into the roles of the three types of drivers. Chapter 2 examines the complementarity of organizational drivers. The results show that firms need to combine awareness of digital technologies, commitment to change, and organizational flexibility to effectively drive digital transformation. Chapter 3 explores the industry-level role of technologies as a key environmental driver. The results reveal that the industry-level roles of technologies carry different technological needs and play a configurating role in the strategy for fostering digital readiness. More specifically, firms in technologically intensive industries prioritize capabilities to sense and respond to digital technologies, while those in less intensive industries combine complementary assets with a commitment to transformation in their digital readiness strategy. Accordingly, the fitting digital readiness configurations drive digital transformation with significant business value. Chapter 4 investigates the power dispersion between IT executives and the top management team on digital innovation, an outcome of firms’ digital transformation. The results demonstrate that power dispersion has an incentivizing benefit that motivates IT executives to engage in digital innovation but also an attenuating effect – at high levels – as it increases collaboration costs that prevent IT executives from leading successful digital innovation. Chapter 4 also recommends IT expertise and firm-specific experience of IT executives as the conditions that strengthen the motivational mechanism or alleviate the collaboration costs respectively.