Introduction to Digital Business

It has become practically axiomatic that technology is a pervasive and accelerating influence on organizations, with wide-reaching impacts on every level of management and business function, from product design and customer experience to HRM and finance. However, there are so many unknowns and underdeveloped areas of knowledge within the arenas of digitalization and the fourth industrial revolution.

What do these things refer to in the first place? What really are the implications for organizational strategy – does strategy change fundamentally, or rather adapt traditional thinking and models to new realities? How do organizational effectively and correctly transform themselves to these forces, in order to thrive in our new realities? Therefore, this book addresses these questions in five parts comprising twelve chapters.

Part I contains a chapter giving an introduction to digitalization anddigital business.

Part II then expands on the major fourth industrial revolution (4IR) technologies in three chapters – Chapter 2 on foundational 4IR technologies, Chapter 3 on the ‘virtuous triangle’ on big data, IoT and AI, and Chapter 4 on other 4IR technologies.

Part III is a single large chapter on traditional strategic management theories and models, which does begin to discuss the influences of 4IR.

Part IV is a more directed section that unpacks specific topics on strategy in the digital age: Chapter 6 on disruption and strategy, Chapter 7 on exponentials, abundance, and convergence, Chapter 8 on business models, Chapter 9 on platform businesses, and Chapter 10 on exponential organizations.

Part V covers topics in digital transformation and change management. Chapter 11 discusses digital maturity, and Chapter 12 covers three topics, namely organizational architecture, traditional change management, and agile organization.