Success factors for IT top management in business transformation towards digital business models

Abstract

Innovative, rapidly developing technologies significantly influence products, services and business models. (Urbach et al., 2019) Nowadays, digital drivers can disrupt a business with unprecedent speed. Digital technologies drive a world with new characteristics. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity are the new normal. (Schwaferts Dino, 2019; Urbach & Röglinger, 2019) Therefore, the IT top management in large enterprises faces the challenge in meeting new demand of the contemporary business. It is expected from the IT top management to partner up in building value for the business, whereas the IT top management currently spends most of their time with the operational part. To transform the organisation and the business model, new skills, organisations and strategies have to be used.(Deloitte LLP, 2013; Khalid et al., 2020) Therefore, the objective of this thesis is to define success factors to be used by the IT top management for adapting the IT strategy in order to enable digital business models. This thesis used a tailored version of the Design Science Research approach of Vaishnavi et al. to prove the thesis statement. The analysis of the literature about the trends in IT management, IT strategy as well as the changing requirements towards the IT organisation has shown to not sufficiently cover the success factors for digital business models. The first suggestion of 20 factors for success based on related topics and trends was summarized....