Chasing the Crowd: Digital Transformations and the Digital Driven System Design Paradigm

摘要

These days business successes and economic opportunities steadily depend on IT-capabilities and digital driven business transformations. Digitalization continues to advance with new business models and growing prospects in various dimensions from higher margins and greater public sector funding to new customers, markets and more diverse suppliers' networks. The key digital transformation drivers of change -fundamental redesign of business activities, processes, and models- are each significantly facilitated by integrated mix of digital technologies that includes, but not limited to, social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) and sometimes SMAC1T when counting the Internet of Things. Increasingly the actual digital transformation has much more to do with information, data, analytics, workflow, culture, and management than traditional IT/IS. In the last decades IT/IS has been essential driver of organizational changes, the recent developments in digitalization and innovations shifted the emphasis on the information rather than the technology in "IT" abbreviation. To understand the prospects and challenges associate with the digital driven business strategy and operational transformations, a modified model of the socio-technical system is created and presented. It depicts at macro level how digital technologies and utility type computing platforms act as drivers for supporting digital business strategies and advancing with the customers. While it simplifies the relations of the internal organization socio-technical model with the external world, the enhanced socio-technical (EST) model indicates the interactions of the four organization's forces: structure, people, technology and processes with the platform technologies such as O2O and SMACIT and further with the crowds. The paper confers the impact of digital driven transformations to the system design and development process and specifically emphasizes on agile transformational practices aligning better with business agility, asset utilization, and greater customers' satisfaction.