Search results

The purpose of this study is to contribute to firms’ capabilities of digital transformation through the identification of strategies for digital decoupling and recoupling.

This paper reports from multiple studies using a combination of methods such as case studies and clinical studies. The method of analysis involves the revisiting of vignettes from interactions with practitioners with the purpose of analyzing patterns in responses to digital transformation.

The findings consist of four strategies used by organizations and individuals in the decoupling of digital from their existing operations. Digital decoupling affords the organization the possibility of remaining largely unaffected by digital transformation. The authors also present four digital recoupling strategies that are used to succeed with digital transformation.

This study is limited by the analytical approach of drawing from multiple previous studies. The research implications consist primarily of a contribution to a better understanding of why and how digital transformation is constrained.

The four strategies of digital decoupling can be used to identify behavior in organizations that limit digital transformation. The four strategies of digital recoupling can be used to instigate a more successful digital transformation.

According to the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to identify digital decoupling strategies as a micro-foundation for organizational resistance to digital transformation.

The purpose of this study is to increase the current understanding of how public sector organizations dynamically balance exploration and exploitation of digital initiatives, i.e. the enactment of digital ambidexterity.

This study uses Zimmermann, Raisch and Cardinal’s perspective of configurational practices for addressing the enactment of digital ambidexterity. The method comprises a qualitative, interpretative case study of a large municipality in Sweden, using both interviews and secondary data.

Through the perspective of configurational practices, the study identifies and describes a set of sub-practices that constitute the enactment of digital ambidexterity. This is then used for theorizing how configurational practices involve the balancing of closeness and distance.

This study is limited by being a single, non-longitudinal case of a Swedish municipality that has implications for generalizability and transferability. Moreover, it opens up for new perspectives to the future study of the enactment of ambidexterity in the public sector.

Organizations striving for digital ambidexterity are recommended to use the configurational approach to assess and design their governance to build ambidextrous capabilities through a combination of closeness and distance.

This study is aimed at strengthening public sectors abilities for continued relevance for its stakeholders over time. With increased need for digital innovation within the public sector, the findings and recommendations derived from the study lead to increased innovation capability, which in turn is expected to lead to increased relevance of services.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that addresses how ambidexterity is enacted within the public sector following the configurational approach. As such, it opens up for new perspectives on organizational ambidexterity.

The purpose of this study is to contribute to research concerning the role of digital infrastructure in digital government. This is done by answering the research question: how does digital infrastructuring constrain ambidexterity in public sector organizations?

The research is designed as a clinical inquiry in a large Swedish municipality, involving data collection in the form of interviews and internal documents. The method of analysis involves both exploring generative mechanisms in digital infrastructuring and theorizing on the findings based on previous literature.

The findings identify four generative mechanisms through which stability and change in digital infrastructuring constrain ambidexterity in terms of both efficiency (exploitation) and innovation (exploration).

This study’s limitations are related to international and intersectoral transferability and risks associated with its approach to clinical inquiry. The main implications are its contribution to the literature on how stability counteracts not only innovation but also efficiency and how change counteracts not only efficiency but also innovation.

This study identifies clear generative mechanisms that should be avoided by managers striving for digital government, and it offers clear recommendations for said managers regarding how to avoid them.

This study offers implications for national-level digital infrastructure policy and contributes to efforts to increase the capabilities of digital government.

As two of the four identified generative mechanisms are novel contributions, this study offers a concrete addition to existing research. This study has resulted in factual change in the studied organization as well as at the national level through successful dissemination of the findings for both policy and practice in other public sector organizations.

While digital transformation holds immense promise, organizations often fail to realize its benefits. This study aims to address how policies for digital transformation benefits realization are translated into practice.

The authors apply a qualitative, comparative case study of two large, public-sector health care organizations in Sweden. Through document and interview data, the authors analyze the process of translation.

The study finds that practice variation is primarily caused by two types of decoupling: policy-practice and means-ends. Contrary to previous studies, coercion in policy compliance is not found to decrease practice variation.

The limitations primarily stem from the empirical selection of two large public health-care organizations in Sweden, affecting the study’s generalizability. Reducing practice variation is more effectively achieved through goal alignment than coercion, leading to implications for the design of governance and control.

Policymakers should, instead of focusing on control-related compliance, work to align organizational objectives and policies to decrease practice variation for successful benefits realization.

The study contributes to better benefits realization of digital transformation initiatives in health care. As such, the authors contribute to a better functioning and more transformative health care in times of increased demand and decreased supply of health-care services.

The study challenges conventional wisdom by identifying that coercion is less effective than goal alignment in reducing practice variation, thereby enhancing the understanding of policy implementation dynamics in health-care settings.

The purpose of this study is to explore and theorize on balancing practices (BP) for digital ambidexterity in the public sector.

The research is designed as an interpretative case study of a large Swedish authority, involving data collection in the form of interviews and internal documents. The method of analysis involves both theorizing on the findings from a previous framework for digital innovation and deriving design implications for ambidextrous governance.

The findings show that all identified BP except one (shadow innovation) is directed toward an increased emphasis on efficiency (exploitation) rather than innovation (exploration). With the increased demand for innovation capabilities in the public sector, this is identified as a problem.

The limitations identified are related to the choice in the method of an interpretative case study, with issues of transferability and empirical generalizability as the main concerns. The implications for research are related to a need for additional studies into the enactment of digital ambidexterity, where the findings offer insight and inspiration for continued research.

The study shows that managers and executives involved in the design and imposition of governance within the public sector need to take the design recommendations for digital ambidexterity into consideration.

The study offers two main implications for practice. First, policymakers need to take the conceptual distinction of efficiency and innovation into account when designing policies for the digital government. Second, existing funding practices need to be re-designed to better facilitate innovation.

This is the first study directed toward enhancing the insight into BP for digital ambidexterity in the public sector. The study has so far resulted in both a localized shift in policy and new directions for research. With the public sector facing needs for increased innovation capabilities, the study offers a first step toward understanding how this is currently counteracted through governance design.

IT governance has become the recognized norm system for chief information officers. The purpose of this paper is to understand how CIOs relate to these norms, by studying how they legitimate incompliance with the norms.

The paper uses an interpretive, qualitative, structured interview study with 18 CIOs in large Swedish organizations regarded as having excellent IT governance practice, using motive talk as analytical lens to identify the informants’ relationship to norms.

The study identifies norm‐specific patterns for how CIOs legitimate incompliance with IT governance, finding that CIOs use a combination of excuse and justifications as strategies of legitimation. The study also finds that CIOs display a tendency of not contesting IT governance‐related norms unless these are in conflict with neighboring professional jurisdictions. This is regarded as an identification of the “margins” of IT governance.

The study illustrates how the theory of motive talk is a viable road ahead for future studies of IT professionals. The generalizability of the identified patterns of legitimation is limited by the selection of large organizations with solely male CIOs, as well as the selection of solely organizations that have succeeded in establishing external legitimacy concerning IT governance and the organizations being Swedish.

CIOs aspiring to increase their legitimacy should avoid direct conflicts with neighboring professions. In addition to this, they should also aspire to be clear in a separation of motive talk and actual practice, since full norm compliance may be detrimental to their factual operations.

The originality of this paper lies in the methodological approach of combining motive talk and speech acts to investigate CIO legitimation practices.

Digital capabilities in operations and delivery through constant data acquisition and future predictions have accelerated digital servitization through reduced uncertainty. New flexibility in value-capture concepts like dynamic and value-based pricing is introduced, which was impossible before. This paper explores two things. Firstly, how embracing contractual flexibility of price-variance and contract lengths influences customer perceived value in artificial intelligence (AI) enabled digital offerings. Secondly, the role transparency plays in the perceived value of such offerings.

The paper uses an experiment-based survey and quantitative assessment within a business-to-business setup with 137 respondents across a couple of industrial manufacturers in the Nordic region.

The authors observations indicate that value-capture-related flexibilities introduced by digital offerings, namely price fluctuations and longer contract lengths, are perceived to deliver more value to customers than standard offerings with known conditions. The authors findings indicate that introduced flexibilities are perceived as opportunities rather than uncertainties leading to higher perceived value by customers. The increased value perception can be explained by the transparency of these offerings provided by data-driven digital technologies'.

The paper is an original work to understand the value-capture implication of digital servitization. The authors discuss the possibilities of different value-capture strategies that companies can adopt within digital business models.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the driving forces for taking environmental considerations to a higher level in a project involving radical innovation.

This qualitative case study is based on ten in‐depth interviews with respondents from the development team for the DryQ project at ABB.

In order to achieve substantial environmental benefits, radical product development is essential. Radical product development has attributes that differ from those of incremental product development. It is important that these differences be acknowledged when preparing to manage environmental challenges in development projects. In radical product development, environmental considerations should be taken into account very early on, at the strategic level of the design process. Setting challenging environmental targets and rewarding environmental improvements was crucial to the outcome of the project presented in this paper.

The research presented here describes one case in one manufacturing company. Readers can, however, learn from this case and apply the insights gained to their own research or use the findings to promote new thinking in their own organisation.

Suggestions are made about how to manage environmental considerations in radical product development.

Few studies combine ecodesign and radical innovation theories, as is done here. Yet this is not a theoretical paper but an industry‐based study of eco‐innovation, from which researchers and practitioners can learn.

Metaphors are a powerful and human way of understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. In quality management (QM), several metaphors are used to describe and bring to life the often-abstract QM concepts and systems. These metaphors are of great importance for how QM is understood, communicated and practiced. However, the metaphors of QM have seldom been systematically screened or put in focus, neither the topic of a critical discussion. The purpose of this paper is hence to contribute with a screening of the metaphors currently used, within QM literature and in practice among QM leaders, and then elaborate on their potential for improvement and development.

The paper is based on a literature review combined with interviews of QM leaders.

The paper highlights that the current QM metaphors provide intuitive associations to properties such as stability, shelter, and structure, but not to the important dynamic properties of QM, such as learning, or to the critical role of people in QM. What can be seen as core properties of QM are communicated by texts or labels added on to metaphors with properties that often are in sharp contrast to them. The paper also provides suggestions for further improvements and development.

The paper highlights the area of metaphors within QM as an important area for future research. It also provides insights concerning the successful use and selection of metaphors in future QM practice.

The purpose of the paper is to contribute to the solution, and understanding, of the current lack of activity concerning the development of practices, such as engineering methods, for the creation of attractive quality. The current situation is clearly problematic given the important positive effects assigned to attractive quality in the literature.

First, different descriptions of attractive quality are examined in order to determine whether there is a common understanding of the concept. Second, the ability to manage attractive quality creation in accordance to a proactive ideal is approached by an examination of the current ability to predict the occurrence of attractive quality.

Two obstacles that currently hinder the development of practices for attractive quality creation are identified. The first obstacle is the diversity of meanings given to the concept of attractive quality, resulting in confusion about what to obtain. The second obstacle identified is the current lack of valid explanations to the occurrence of attractive quality, resulting in an inability to develop proactive practices.

The practical implications of bringing attention to, and overcoming, the two obstacles identified will potentially be substantial. A common attractive quality concept and valid explanations to the occurrence of attractive quality will constitute an essential base for the successful development of practices, such as engineering methods, for attractive quality creation.

The paper contributes via the identification of two critical areas in need of intensified attention and future research in order to facilitate the sought‐after development of practices for the creation of attractive quality.