Digital Performance in Everyday Life

Digital Skills Mobilization within Incumbent Organizations: The Agentic Role of Digital Champions

“…Specifically, in studying a large international incumbent in the utility industry that undertook a digital transformation programme with a specific focus on digital skills development, our findings reveal that mobilization should first assess the organization's initial condition and internal digital skills endowment, which, it is suggested, should be considered the primary input for the mobilization process. Owing to the pervasiveness of digital technologies and affordances in everyday life (Brennen and Kreiss, 2016; Gratch and Gratch, 2021), combined with the technological legacy each firm possesses in terms of existing assets and initiatives (Fitzgerald et al., 2014), incumbent organizations seldom begin their digital skills mobilization journey from a clean slate. Instead, organizations are to be seen as a pool of digital skills, resulting from the combination of formal strategic or tactical attempts to develop them top‐down (for instance, through training initiatives) and informal and unstructured individual abilities that employees and managers may have nurtured outside of the organization boundaries and that could be conveyed bottom‐up (for instance, the presence of an employee capable of developing mobile apps as a hobby).…”