Digital and IT Enabled Organisational Transformation – know the difference

Understanding how to differentiate between digital transformation and IT enabled organisational transformation is more than just semantics. New research not only shows what the difference is, but also what knowing what the difference is can save an organisation a lot of trouble. 

Digital transformation research

The idea of digital transformation has grown in both importance for organisations and in terms of research interest since 2013, with almost 4 million peer-reviewed research papers being published about the topic and almost 30,000 research papers being published in just the first six months of 2020.

Growing interest

Previous to 2013, when the idea of digital transformation really started to take hold within organisations and the research fields, Information Systems and IT enabled organisational transformation started to emerge in the 1990s from studies about the transformational impact that computers and IT systems was starting to have on organisations.

The difference that makes a difference

The question is in what way is digital transformation different from IT enabled organisational transformation, and does it make a difference?

New study

A new (2020) large-scale technical review has just been published. It looked at the current organisational practices in terms of IT organisational transformation and digital transformation and was conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Bremen in Germany, the Copenhagen Business School at the University of Digitisation in Denmark, the University of Montpelier in France and the Westminster Business School at the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom.

Below is a podcast of an interview with the researchers. The full research briefing was sent to members in 2020.

Researchers

Prof. Dr. Lauri Wessel

• Professor of Information Management & Digital Transformation 
• European New School of Digital Studies: www.europeannewschool.eu
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauri-wessel-b5a15754/

Podcast

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Transcript

– Hi, welcome back, and in this podcast, we’ve got unusually a team of researchers, and we’re looking at the differences between digital transformation and IT enabled organizational transformation. And we’re gonna be having a look at what they are, how they’re different and what that actually means for organizations, because that’s quite an important impact on organizations. So team, would you like to just go through quickly introduce yourselves, who you are, what organizations are you working in or about to work in? And we’ll take the questions from there.

– Okay, very good. My name is Lauri Wessel, I’m currently a professor at the University of Bremen, and I’m about to transfer to the University of Frankfurt , the European university at the newly instituted European New School for Digital Studies, which is an interdisciplinary Institute studying digital transformation. And my… Most of my work relates to digital transformation of organizations in society, particularly with a focus on digital healthcare.

– Cool, oh, really interesting, great, and good luck in your new job.

– Thank you so much.

– [David] Brilliant. Who next?

– Yep, hello, my name is Abayomi Baiyere, I’m an Assistant Professor at the Department of Digitalization at Copenhagen Business School. So my research kind of looks at digital transformation and disruptive innovations. So I look at disruptive innovations that foresees and things happening that steer organizations towards digital transformation. And I look at digital transformation as ways in which they respond to these shifts that they face in their industries.

– Oh, interesting. Really interesting. A pleasure to have you on. Thanks Abay.

– [Abayomi] Thank you.

– [Roxana] So I’m Roxana Ologeanu-Taddei, and I am Associate Professor in Information Systems at Toulouse Business School in the South of France. And I’m interested in digital transformation and digital innovation in the healthcare sector. And I’m working also on this area on a new topic related to IT, consumer IT and consumerization about technologies and practices related to that.

– Fantastic. Thanks Roxana, I appreciate that.

– Hi, I’m Jonghyuk Cha, a Lecturer in Information Systems at the Westminster Business School at University of Westminster. Most of my research works are in the area of organization aspects of infringe… Information systems and project management, particularly focusing on organizational transformation and benefits realization. And I do teach some relevant themes like digital innovation, disruption and project… And program management.

– And then finally, me, I’m…. My name is Tina Blegind Jensen, I’m Professor at the Department of Digitalization at CBS, the same place where Abay is. And my research focuses on the organizational and managerial issues related to the implementation and use of information systems. And I am running a research theme on digital transformation of work. So most recently I’ve been looking into how managers, what they should do and not do when they try to keep track of their employees via a new tool such as a people analytics. So that’s what I’m currently working on.

– Oh, right. Really interesting. So you and your team have recently published a really intere… Very interesting paper about unpacking the difference between digital transformation and IT enabled organizational transformation. What I’m interested in is what led up to the paper and what inspired the work into the differences between these two digital transformation and IT enabled trans… Organizational transformation.

– Yeah, so I can provide a bit of a background story here because we all met for the first time in 2017, at a paper-a-thon event at the most prestigious conference we have in our field, called the International Conference on Information Systems. And it was held in Seoul in South Korea. And the paper-a-thon in our field is like a hackathon, where the goal is to facilitate research collaborations, but also to help participants develop their research ideas. And for the most promising projects at that paper-a-thon event to accelerate a publication review process. So at these events participants, they join, if they have an interesting research idea, if they have some extensive data material, if they have some valuable theory insights. So all of the other co-authors, they signed up for this event because they had one of these aspects in their luggage, so to say.

– [David] Yeah.

– I was a mentor, I was serving as a mentor at this event. And so what was interesting here is that I teamed up with these amazing scholars and we started talking about their research ideas. And within two days, it materialized into a very nice topic that they were able to pitch at the final day of this event. And they ended up… I think there were more than 20 plus teams of authors working together and they ended up, or we ended up among the four finalists pitching the idea and then getting into this sort of occasion to have an accelerated review process in our… One of the most prestigious journals in our field, the journal of the Association on Information Systems. So this was kind of the event leading up to this. And now from this event, we had an extended abstract, and we were able to present at the final day of the conference what the research idea was. But now to enter into a journal with a submission, we had to really do a lot of work, hard work to sort of get that idea materialized. So what we did is we met up in Copenhagen, sometime after the conference to have a two day workshop where we really worked on the ideas and the two cases we have in this study. And that’s where we decided that Lauri would become the lead author. So taking the lead in this, because we are a lot of authors so someone has to take the lead. So I think Lauri maybe you would want to sort of also expand a bit on this.

– Yes. Yeah. So that was… Takes us back to late January, 2018, where we decided that there will be one lead author who then was in charge of basically also running the project, setting schedules, et cetera, et cetera. And the particular focus of the paper emerged throughout several rounds of the review process. But at the core, it… There was a concern in our author team that in that digital transformation really matters for basically every organization out there currently. And speaking to executives and also reading the literature a bit, it becomes very clear that most organizations struggled very, very heavily with the implications of digital transformation and actually managing it effectively. So better understanding how this can be managed. And what is special about it compared to other transformations, I guess, is something that we as authors thought would be really, really valuable both in theory and in practice. And then when we actually allow ourselves to look a little bit into existing theory, then we will see that transformation is a topic that is… Has a rich history. And even if you look at famous transformation cases in business like Netflix or Nokia, these are businesses that have changed their value delivery and value capture several times in their history. So transformation as such, shouldn’t be new to practitioners or neither theorists basically. And this is what we put into the paper and say, look, we have decades of research on transformation yet still it seems that practitioners out there and theorists alike don’t really understand what is special about digital transformation. So we started out with comparing this fri… Or this friction where we say we have a… We have a current transformation that we’re observing and something seems to be special since otherwise there wouldn’t be that headache out in business practice. And then we looked at two cases and tried to pull out what is very, very different between these… Between the sort of a classical transformation process and the digital transformation process. Because based on our study, I think we can say that ours is the first empirical study that disentangles these two, and offers some valuable insights for practitioners and researchers on how to better manage and understand them.

– Yes, I have not come across another one. Okay. Brilliant. Oh, that’s really useful. Thanks Lauri. Great. So can you just explain briefly what the study was and what you found?

– Yeah, so there’s two cases that are compared and maybe Roxana, you can start out with the case we call alpha.

– Yes. Yes, because I think that we have to underline that we have an empirical research and the research was somehow driven by the data, so the empirical cases. So the first case, which we will call alpha, is a French hospital, and alpha’s value proposition is to provide healthcare services. So in this hospital, senior executives initiated a new identity climb to transform the hospital in a more digital hospital, meaning achieving a zero paper strategy. More specifically, the hospital had implemented an electronic medical record, which is similar to ERP, Electronic Resources Planning, for patients’ files. So all patients data needed to be recorded in the electronic medical record. This was also the case of radiology images brought by patients when coming for consultation. Secretaries were in charge to process these images which means to fulfill several tasks for every image. This was felt as an imposition to their work practices, and they lacked clear rules and learning to do them correctly. Recording these images was very important for doctors to make a diagnosis. Finally, senior executives carried out training workshops and tutorials for secretaries. We called this section a reconciliation. The outcome of this process is the emergence of reinforced organizational identity, which means that it happens beyond the senior executives claims and plans. Moreover, technologies reported here the existing value proposition. So this case is quite different from the beta case. So Abay maybe you can talk about the beta case.

– All right, thanks Roxana. So if I may just start from where Roxana has kind of stopped. So what we saw in the alpha case is a case of an organization, that’s taking technology and making this claim that they are transforming themselves. But then in the beta case, we were looking at a manufacturing company, that’s also having a claim that they are transforming themselves and technology was playing a role in it. But we now found out that there’re fundamental differences between these two cases, while in the case of beta, beta is a manufacturing company, their value proposition has always been that they enable their customers to get the machines running. So their value proposition is really tied to the hardware. But then they find themselves competing with startups and these startups were offering similar value propositions with beta, I was just a different… It was just different competition metrics that it brought into the industry. And this really challenged beta, so beta had to rethink themselves on two things. So they had this competition coming from the software angle, but then they also noticed that there are new technologies emerging that could actually enable them do different things. They had IOT, they had 3D, and importantly for them, they already had a software that they had developed in-house, but this software is just something they bundle with their hardware. So it’s not really a big deal. It’s just a peripheral thing that accompanies the hardware that’s been sold. So the transformation that actually happened, we observe a company that’s at its core as a manufacturing company, gradually morphing into a tech company, a software company. Now this shows that the transformation that we’re witnessing here is actually a fundamental change in the identity of the organization just beyond using it, plugging in a technology to do what they’ve typically done before beta. We also noticed that the way they leverage technology is such that it shifted their value proposition from just being a company that says, “Oh, we can let your machine spindle run every 24/7.” To a company that says, “Hey, we can be your digital partner. We know you’re also thinking about digital technology, but we can be the one that guides you as you go along that journey.” So this kind of shows the difference between the two cases that we studied.

– Why are the perceptions of the organizations, you know, its leaders, managers, and the people so important here?

– Okay, so yeah, I would say, because transformation agenda can influence different level of organizations and that interplays differently. We’ve found some evidence in our data set that sometimes top executives, a lack of understanding about the change and impact of digital transformation in work practices could alter the trajectory of a planed transformation activities. For example, new identity claims led by top management could give rise to managers or people’s impositions and reconciliations. So it is critical to be fully aware of what this meant by their own digital transformation initiatives across the whole organizational levels. Finally, in addition to that, I wish to highlight that it is also important to recognize digital transformation has become a proactive element to lead or redefine the nature of business organizations compared to our previous experience such as digital technologies as simply a reactive element to support predefined business agenda.

– So one of the many interesting things that comes out of your paper, and there’s quite a lot actually, is that differentiating between IT enabled organizational transformation and digital transformation is related to organizational identity, and a degree of redefining the value proposition. Is the differentiation in fact, a question of business model and value proposition definition rather than just technology application?

– It has a lot to do with business model, I would say, business model redefinition, actually, because when you look into cases from the corporate world where you see digital transformation as a major challenge to companies. Take a classical car company like Mercedes-Benz currently going through, or expected to go through a major shift in production technology and business model. It is clearly linked to the idea that such companies need to find novel business models, largely based in services and continuous revenue… Models of continuous revenue generation. And I think this is an aspect that many executives out there are fully aware of, we need new business models. When I talk to practitioners, this is one of the big topics they consider. However, what our study brings to the fore, and this is where the identity comes in, that when I redefine my business model fundamentally then I often, and this is something that on the senior executive level, I sometimes find is less on the radar. I also redefine what this organization is and what its self-understanding is. So when you look at the shift from a classical car company to a mobility provider, that’s quite a difference, right? That is more mainly based on services, less one-off sales, entirely new models of selling, of expertise that you need to run the business. And these aspects that you could say are very strategically motivated when you roll them out in a company, they go to the core of its identity because many employees and middle level managers will have particular self understandings that is their identity. And they will have a particular understanding of what the company is that they work for, say an elite firm or not an elite firm. And this is something that is really, really important to consider because it’s all over the place when you look at digital transformation, because it’s most often companies that completely redefine their value propositions and business models. And that goes along in new identity, but it’s something that is really novel based on our study that it demands an important aspect of managerial attention. The relationship there is between the value proposition that I change and the identity that I change and that needs a lot of care to be managed during the transformation process. So in our study, we actually found that the work identity of sales professionals was linked to a value proposition that management basically had left behind. But, you know, as they tried to change it, the work professionals were like, “Whoa, wait a minute. This is not what we stand for. This is not what we do. We don’t really understand why this is happening.” So you need to really onboard them and understand within your organization where’s the current identity and what aspects am I changing of that when I formulate a change in the value proposition. So I think this is a very crucial link. And in terms of theory, it’s sort of breaches strategic management and organizational theory, but it’s… When you look into the business press and you’ll see the claims that many top managements make about how firms change, how their revenue sources change, how this changes, how that changes. I find that basically all over the place. And I think this is why I think it’s so important to consider.

– But is this just kind of semantics? You know, does it really make a difference how people perceive what they’re engaged in?

– It’s much more fundamental actually. It’s not only how I perceive what I engaged in, it is how I define myself and what I do. So in the area of digital health, you will find… And the literature is replete with that, challenges with related to implementation of digital technology that arise because training and education of medical professionals, isn’t yet adapted to the high level technologies that we have in this industry. So oftentimes you have a very professionally reasoned resistance to that. Say, my expertise matters more than what the algorithm says, briefly speaking, yeah?

– [David] Yes.

– Or, you know, simply speaking. So I think it’s clearly much more than semantics because it goes to really to the core of who you define… How you define yourself and what your work is, and why it matters. So if you would go back to the example of our manufacturing company, it was really a challenge for sales personnel who was a very important group within the organization to link these new revenue models that senior management had to come up with to what they were doing and how they were seeing themselves. And this is much more than a mere technicality. You actually have to really educate and make… And promote a different mindset and thereby a different identity. And I think this is something that is very, very valuable about the paper, and I hope it will inform business practice on a large scale.

– Sorry, Lauri, if I can just add to this because I think this is a really important point that you’re making. So it’s really not just about semantics. It’s really very important that we go out and study the profound implication it has for individuals, groups, organizations considering what… Who they think they are and what they do. So if the top management come with a new identity claim saying, now we are going to be this and that in the future. Well, it’s very important that we then also understand what are the implications for the workers and the teams in the organization. How do they understand that new identity? Do they understand it at all? Did they understand that we are moving in a new direction? And I think that’s really the strength with this paper is that we have this sort of detailed two case studies, where we actually go into some depth with understanding what’s going on in practice. So the richness of these empirical studies is really important here, and hopefully will be helpful father when executives read this and then say, okay, am I… How is my organization related to these two cases described here in much detail, in the article?

– Yes, I would agree. I think the thing that comes across from the two cases for me is that quite starkly is that it changes the narrative not only for the individuals within the organizations whether you’re in sales or anything else, the kind of stories that they’re telling themselves, not only about who they are, but what they’re doing and how they’re going to do it, and how they’re going to relate to each other, but also outside. And it… Which is one of the reasons why we’ve kind of picked on this paper is that it’s a very… It comes across very clearly that that narrative really shifts with things like, you know, whether it’s digital transformation or it’s just IT enabled organizational transformation. So what impact do you think this distinction between digital transformation and IT enabled organizational transformation, it actually is gonna have for organizations?

– Yeah. Basically the… Such impacts arising from this level of paper could be specified by mentioning theoretical contribution impact,

– [David] You’re right.

– and practical impact, practical implication. Within the theoretical perspective, we empirical it this entangles the conceptual similarities and differences between two types of transformation with an emphasis on the process model provided.

– [David] Yeah.

– And in the process model the details in both micro and macro levels show how digital transformation unfolds over time. For example, in the macro perspective, for example, we’ve began to understand how the relationship between value proposition and organizational identity can clarify the difference between two transformations. And as another example, in a micro perspective we see the interplay of how identity claims expressed by top management could lead to impositions and reconciliations. These are the example of theoretical impact and Roxana can you elaborate the practical elements please?

– [Roxana] Yes, of course. So we’d say that practically speaking we show that digital transformation is not only unusually related to the technology and technology application, but also, and especially about strategy and changes in work practices, both on the operational level and on the organizational level. These two levels are interdependent. So beyond the focus on speed related to digital, digital transformation is a complex and long process. So to succeed, companies have to be aware about these different levels and to be receptive to employees’ feedback, they have to facilitate learning and reconciliation actions instead of rigid reaction to people’s problems. So, in addition, if they want that their company go digital, managers should carefully consider digital technology in redefining the organization’s value proposition, and of course, the identity of the company. So we hope, we really hope that our paper will help managers to anticipate what challenges may arise during their efforts to transform organizations.

– Well, I think what tends to happen in organizations is they just tend to see digital or technology as a set of tools and that it actually doesn’t have any impact beyond that, but what this paper is definitely showing them, almost clearly, it’s having a profound impact on the organization, its direction, the business model and a whole series of other things. So if you were to boil this down now to a few kind of practical takeaways for practitioners, you know, what would that be, and how should organizations be doing things differently?

– I’ll kind of boiled it down to four key points. And this builds on a lot of things that my colleagues already mentioned earlier. So the first will be kind of tailoring the mindsets to the specific transformation that you are following. And I use an analogy to bring these to four. One is, if you’re doing IT enabled organizational transformation, I like to think of it as a case of a cub becoming a lion. Now you’re gonna get a better, a faster, and more efficient entity at the end. Well, if you’re doing digital transformation, think about it as a larva becoming a butterfly. Now that’s a qualitatively different organization. And by the time you start thinking about your transformation in this light, it just… Your conversation, your organization just takes a different direction. And I think this is important. This goes to the value proposition that my colleagues have mentioned, the identity they’ve mentioned, as well as the inner working of the organization. Number two, technology. Now, the way you view technology, if you’re doing IT enabled organizational transformation, typically it’s technology is seen as a facilitator. It just enables you to get the transformation done and you already alluded to that, David. But if you’re doing digital transformation, technology is not just a facilitator, technology could also be an outcome. So you see technology as something that might emerge out of the transformation that you’re actually doing. Then number three… Now there’s a saying that with power comes, great responsibility. Allow me to kind of rephrase that. So with digital transformation comes great opportunities, but along with that comes great challenges. Now, what I mean with this is that now that you have opportunities to go to different markets, to come up with new offerings, it also expands your competition, right? ‘Cause now you’re entering other spaces that you may not be familiar with. So the opportunities are there, but then there are challenges. And this challenges also translates to the fourth point. You need to think about new logics. There’s a shift in logic, if you’re doing digital transformation that may just not be compatible with what you’re familiar with. And for example, I think one of my colleagues talked about the sales persons in the beta case. These are veterans when it comes to selling hardware they’re just so good at it. But now you’re telling them to sell software. They can’t even see it. They used to the bigger, the better, the bigger, the more we can charge. Now you give them a USB disc and tell them to sell it for a million dollars, like this is a rip off. So it requires a different logic in terms of the way you think. They’re used to in a manufacturing company they’re just used to this water fall, you plan, preplan, and do your project manual, but not… It just does not apply to the way you create software. So in a nutshell, you’re going to need to come up and think about a shift in logic in the way you operate.

– I really liked that the example that you gave of kind of a cub turning into a lion or a larva of turning into a butterfly. And that’s what these technologies are actually doing for organizations they create… Just having them creates change, but it creates changes and much more fundamental than just having a new tool. But, you know, I suppose if you think about humankind, you know, just becoming like right in the early days of humanity, just becoming a being that is using tools was actually more than just a game changer for that individual. It started a long series of change for humanity.

– [Abayomi] Right, right.

– And then those tools started to get more and more different uses, we started to develop that from, you know, just picking up a bone of something and hitting something over their head maybe, to sharpening sticks, to using flint to… All of these things now start to have a significantly different impact not only on the tool itself, but also the identity of the person carrying the tool, because right now I can do different things with those tools. And those different things mean that my identity as a hunter, as a gatherer, as a whatever it happens to be now starts to fundamentally shift. Now, this is happening on a much more complex process within organizations.

– [Abayomi] Right. The other thing that I’d pick up on that you’ve said there that I think is really important for practitioners is that new digital technologies whether they be hardware or software whatever they happen to be are actually both creating challenges and opportunities. And they’re also, because you can’t predict the impact of everything, they’re creating a set of emergent properties. Now, quite often, organizations aren’t sitting back and looking out for the emergent properties because within there, those emergent properties will show us where the opportunities are that are being missed, and a lot of organizations do miss them. But also where new challenges are both for the organization itself, but also for the industry. And I think they’re kind of critical, and that again comes out with, from your paper quite clearly. So team, so what next for you and the team in terms of research, where does all this go?

– Well, to be honest we haven’t met each other after the final version released, our next step would be to have a pint of beer or a cup of tea…

– I like that

– Disclaimer, the paper was accepted two days before the shutdown began, basically. So that was…

– Yeah.

– That was perhaps a challenge. Yeah, because otherwise there would be the big conference coming up in December, but it’s all going virtual. So a personal meeting for that reason has… For these reasons hasn’t happened yet. So I guess what’s next, I guess that scholarly speaking, I think a field surrounding the topic of digital transformation is just about to begin to really form. And I think there’s many, many studies to still to be… Still to be done. So some aspects are actually dig a little bit deeper into micro levels, sort of you could have an ethnographic study that looks at how say nurses make sense of base technologies. When you look into care settings then that is one area that I think is very important because oftentimes managements have particular expectations towards new technologies, and then they don’t perform. And I think this is one aspect that could be very interesting at the micro level. And then of course the macro counterpart would be more digital transformation of society. I think there’s… We see, you know, po… A wide range of topics going from policy issues and then to more business related issues that are of concern to, with societal implications. So some of my work on digital healthcare looks at caring for persons with dementia at home. So sort of more of a societal topic. And I think this is one of the areas where this research could be taken.

– I think that as we… As you can also see, we come from many different places. It’s only Abay and I who are in the same organization these days. But what… So we met acc… Kind of accidentally at the paper-a-thon in 2017. And we… I think all of us will continue working on some of these ideas. Maybe we will not work at that whole team together. Maybe we’ll sort it out and say, let’s the two of us work on something that is related to this, but we will all work on something related to digital transformation. So in different ways as Lauri also mentioned. So, you know, I’m very interested right now in putting together an article on how to design the digital workplace of the future. And that also comes… That digital workplace comes from digital transformation but it also requires digital transformation. So, you know, that’s how I think all of us will continue along this stream of research, and bearing in mind our own insights from this study that we really have to be very careful how we use the different terms. Because also how we engage with practitioners when we talk about this, when we go and have courses with our executive students, or when we do research, we really have to be careful what we are talking about, so that we make sure that we are looking into the right phenomenon, but also draw the the implications that need to be drawn.

– So, for example, Roxana and I are already working on a sort of followup study where we look at the use of WhatsApp by doctors within a hospital and the management and policy implications it has because what these guys use WhatsApp for is sharing of patient pictures. And that’s of course, slightly a problem for data security and other hospital policies. And then we look at how, I mean, and it’s an aspect related to digital transformation. You bring in consumer technologies into the workplace and you use them because they’re convenient but then maybe that’s something that from an organizational viewpoint could create a lot of problems. So we look a bit into how can you manage this tension between the digital transformation that we basically all want, but then we have these WhatsApps of the world that we didn’t really mean when we say we wanted it. And that looks at managing this tension.

– Yeah, that’s really interesting. Yeah and lots of organizations are using consumer technology, you know, Slack and WhatsApp,

– Yeah.

– and various other places. And it does have an impact, but it… And not only in terms of social, legal and things like that, but also just in… Again with everything that you were talking, it becomes an enabler for other things as well. And certainly in terms of technology, as we kind of march into industry 4.0 with AI, robotics and things like that that’s also changing people’s identity how they’re interacting at work, how isolated they feel, how part of it, you know, organizational commitment and a whole series of other things that start to get attached to all of this. How can people find you, and how would you like people to contact you?

– So I can be found very soon in the European University Viadrina and Frankfurt at the Oder. And the easiest way is to go to the website, europeannewschool.com, spelled in one word, and there’s all my contact information. And the easiest way is just to drop me an email.

– Okay. That’s correct. Thanks Lauri.

– And I can be found at the CBS website. So feel free to either call or send me an email. But I can also be found on LinkedIn, so it would be nice if people will link up with me so we could start a conversation there. And then I suggest that if anyone is interested in sort of these digitalization issues and discussions, we have also at CBS website a number of executive courses, if you allow to make a bit of publicity. Absolutely.

– That, you know, you can look into, if you’re interested. Some of the courses do run online, so fully online these days, and others are of course, with physical meetup, but we do have a course catalog there, if interested in knowing more about these topics.

– Yes. Yeah. I think that it’s really important for people in, well in industry, but in organizations to connect more with universities anyway.

– And very important for us to connect.

– Well, precisely. Yes, it goes both ways. Yes, we’ve looked at a number of papers that have looked at kind of industry-university collaboration, and the knowledge flows of both ways.

– [Tina] Yeah.

– And they’re critical for both sides.

– [Tina] Agreed.

– Thanks, Tina.

– Abay.

– All right, so for me, I actually really enjoy speaking with practitioners. I would appreciate the opportunity to have a dialogue with you ’cause I believe we sharpen each other by the time we engage in conversations on this topic and I’m so excited about this thing. So if you wanna talk about it, just feel free to reach me on the CBS website, LinkedIn is also an option. But in general, I’ll be very happy to engage in a dialogue.

– Okay. Sorry, this is completely unscripted but I just kind of thought about this. One of the things that we could do is set up a community practice within our members area. And then if you want to, you can dive in there, we’ve got a whole load of practitioners, right from consultants who are doing digital transformation and things through to industry people in large organizations, banks, project managers, the whole kind of works. And that might be an interesting thing to do.

– Sounds brilliant.

– [Tina] Sounds very good, yeah.

– Okay. All right. Well set that up.

– [Roxana] I can also be found by the website of my business school, which is not CBS, but TBS, Toulouse Business School. And I can also be reached by LinkedIn, and it would be very, very interesting to have feedback about this podcast and about our paper from practitioners, from different sectors. I hope that practitioners will engage a dialogue with us.

– Yeah, finally, I believe all of our profile and contact information available on each university websites, so including myself. And given that we are living in a very unpredictable situation, email would be the best initial channel to communicate each other at the moment. And in addition to CBS, I’m working in WBS, Westminster Business school, we’ll be launching the new course for industry practitioners, focusing on digital business, as I’m working in the center for digital business research. So,

– [David] Yeah.

– anybody interested in that that should be a great opportunity.

– Great. That’s really good. Thank you very much. I really appreciate your time. And this has been a fascinating interview with the team. And so organized.

– [Lauri] Thank you very much for your interest in having us.

– It’s very important for us too, because we talk a lot about how to bridge better to practitioners. And so have someone like you contacting us and helping us with that because sometimes we are not as… We’re not very good at talking in a practitioner language. So I think this is really important and I really appreciate your… All your work and in making this link, this is really, from an academic point of view, this is really very useful.

– [David] Yeah, no, I’m pleased. I’ve really enjoyed this. This is great, and we’ll keep in contact.

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