The Clash of the Titans

Abstract

The emergence of digital technologies provides organizations with affordable, easy-to-use, and easy-to-learn technologies that opens line-of-business (LOB) managers to participate in information technology-led innovations. Such participatory actions by the LOB-managers in information technology (IT) innovations at the department levels will lead the creation of new roles like the ‘chief digital marketing officer.' While the overall outlook for innovation becomes positive through such expanding contributions of the LOB-managers, such additions will ignite new challenges. Especially, such roles and approaches will contest the traditional centralized technology management approaches. This chapter provides three engagement models on how the LOB-managers and chief information officers could interact harmoniously to enhance the quality of IT innovations led by LOB-managers.

Preparing ecosystems for platformization: Insights from multiple case studies

“…Because platformization entails adjustment to business routines among incumbents (Lokuge et al, 2018;Nambisan & Sawhney, 2011;Sirmon et al, 2011), the ecosystem champion, when advocating for platformization, must contend with the fact that digital transformation cannot succeed without partners' commitment (Dattée et al, 2018;Khanagha et al, 2022). In other words, platformization can only happen among incumbents when the latter not only feels a compelling need to transform contemporary business practices but are also prepared to break existing path dependencies and digitalize their operations (Tripsas, 2009).…”