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Digitalization impacts individuals, businesses, and society as a whole. In particular, the fast spread of digital technologies sets enormous change in motion. This implies huge challenges - and at the same time - promising chances for companies. The successful exploitation of such chances, however, requires many companies to transform appropriately. It is not that businesses need digitalization, but rather if they ignore it, they will be left behind. This particularly concerns well-established companies that are not primarily structured around or operating in the digital economy, and thus do not have native digital structures, yet whose future will depend on successful digital transformation. Therefore, this study is geared towards managers of well-established companies, presenting them our perspective on the changes and chances associated with digital transformation. Based on the empirical insights from interviews, workshops, and applied research projects, six action fields are identified as relevant for successful digital transformation: Customer, Value Proposition, Operations, Data, Organizations, and Transformation Management. Each field is discussed in detail within this study. Furthermore, we propose a digital transformation self-assessment tool, allowing companies to assess their individual need for action within each field based on their individual prioritization.

Emerging technologies are changing today’s economic environment with unprecedented speed and in unpredictable ways. These dynamics threaten incumbent organizations, which are caught between continuing to effectively deliver their outcomes to existing customers and leaving established paths to leverage the opportunities afforded by emerging technologies that are still changing and developing. To address these tensions, incumbents often must implement a variety of structural and contextual changes. However, these changes strongly depend on the respective environment the incumbents are embedded in. In managing emerging technologies, incumbents thus need to understand and address a broad range of interrelated techno-organizational factors. At the same time, the increasing autonomy and intelligence of emerging technologies challenges the effectiveness of established concepts of information systems research for managing traditional information technology. To address this gap, this thesis presents a socio-technical perspective on the management of emerging technologies that is informed by the ideas of critical realism and considers opportunities and tensions for incumbent organizations as well as their contextual embedding. First, it delves into a deeper understanding of the potentials of emerging technologies in relation to their respective context and organizational actors. In particular, the thesis focuses on two such technologies: blockchain and artificial intelligence. Second, it elaborates on how incumbents can prepare emerging technologies for effective use that lack established use cases and patterns. It explores how the techno-organizational context gives rise to a variety of interrelated mechanisms that can stimulate or constrain experimentation activities with these technologies. Moreover, this thesis investigates how incumbents prepare for effective technology use by building necessary digital capabilities and managing tensions between leveraging digital opportunities and effectively delivering outcomes despite disruption. Resolving these tensions often leads to an accumulation of digital debt, technical and informational obligations that will need to be addressed in the future. Incumbents must manage this digital debt carefully to avoid negative in the long-term. This thesis contextualizes the contribution of seven embedded research papers and provides a holistic perspective on managing emerging technologies, contributing to a better understanding of opportunities and tensions for incumbents.

Our article provides insights into which critical success factors (CSFs) for digital transformation projects are considered particularly relevant from the perspective of companies. To this end, we used an online survey addressing German companies with an existing set of CSFs. The aim of our study was to obtain a practice-oriented ranking to derive approaches for further research into CSFs in digital transformation. Our study shows that it is primarily CSFs in the dimensions of Corporate organization and Technology that are considered to be particularly relevant. For example, when asked about important CSFs, the companies stated that digital transformation projects require besides other factors a suitable Corporate culture, Top management support, and a Unified digital corporate strategy/vision. Thereby, this article contributes to CSF research in the context of digital transformation with profound experience and orientation knowledge. This will make it possible to develop practical recommendations for action and assistance in shaping the digital transformation.

Purpose: This paper aims at conceptualizing an holistic approach for assessing and characterizing ecosystem types in the context of digital offerings. Design/Methodology/Approach: We conducted a systematic literature review to summarize relevant aspects of ecosystems in the context of digital servitization. Findings: We developed a framework in form of a morphological box that combines various relevant aspects of ecosystems within five overarching dimensions. Originality/Value: Our framework can be of value for both researchers and practitioners for assessing and characterizing ecosystems in the context of digital offerings.

The COVID 19 crisis has highlighted the key role of the public health service (PHS), with its approximately 375 municipal health offices involved in the pandemic response. Here, in addition to a lack of human resources, the insufficient digital maturity of many public health departments posed a hurdle to effective and scalable infection reporting and contact tracing. In this article, we present the maturity model (MM) for the digitization of health offices, the development of which took place between January 2021 and February 2022 and was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Health. It has been applied since the beginning of 2022 with the aim of strengthening the digitization of the PHS. The MM aims to guide public health departments step by step to increase their digital maturity to be prepared for future challenges. The MM was developed and evaluated based on qualitative interviews with employees of public health departments and other experts in the public health sector as well as in workshops and with a quantitative survey. The MM allows the measurement of digital maturity in eight dimensions, each of which is subdivided into two to five subdimensions. Within the subdimensions a classification is made on five different maturity levels. Currently, in addition to recording the digital maturity of individual health departments, the MM also serves as a management tool for planning digitization projects. The aim is to use the MM as a basis for promoting targeted communication between the health departments to exchange best practices for the different dimensions.

The industrial track at ISoLA 2021 provided a platform for presenting industrial perspectives on digitalization and for discussing trends and challenges in the ongoing digital transformation from the perspective of where and how formal methods can contribute to addressing the related technical and societal challenges. The track continued two special tracks at ISoLA conferences focused on the application of learning techniques in software engineering and software products, and industrial applications of formal methods in the context of Industry 4.0. Topics of interest included but were not limited to Industry 4.0, industrial applications of formal methods and testing, as well as applications of machine learning in industrial contexts.

Digitalization disrupts business models and smartifies products and services. Based on the ever-faster emergence and adoption of digital technologies such as the Internet of Things, blockchain, or augmented reality, digitalization irreversibly changes our private lives and organizational routines from all industries on a global scale. Thereby, digitalization develops unlimited potential in terms of innovation, connectivity, efficiency and productivity improvements. However, research and practice still lack a fundamental understanding of the nature of digital technologies. To address this gap, we developed a multi-layer taxonomy of digital technologies that includes eight dimensions structured along the layers of established modular architectures, i.e. service, content, network, and device. Based on our taxonomy, we also identified seven archetypes of digital technologies by means of a cluster analysis. To revise and evaluate our artefacts, we classified 45 digital technologies from the Gartner Hype Cycle of Emerging Technologies and conducted evaluation rounds with other researchers. Our results contribute to the descriptive knowledge on digital technologies. They enable researchers and practitioners to classify digital technologies on two levels of aggregation and to make informed decisions about their adoption.