How Big Old Companies Navigate Digital Transformation

Elements of Successful Digital Transformation1 2New digital technologies, particularly what we refer to as SMACIT 3 (social, mobile, analytics, cloud and Internet of things [IoT]) technologies, present both game-changing opportunities and existential threats to big old companies.GE's "industrial internet" and Philips' digital platform for personalized healthcare information represent bets made by big old companies attempting to cash 1 Janis Gogan is the accepting senior editor for this article.2 This research was previously reported in the Proceedings of the Thirty Seventh International Conference on Information Systems, Dublin, Ireland, December 2016.We thank the Track Chairs, Associate Editor and Reviewers of the Practice Track for their feedback and suggestions on our original submission.3 This acronym is pronounced "smack it"-as in, score a digital strategy home run when you SMACIT out of the baseball park.There are more digital technologies than implied by this acronym, including artificial intelligence, blockchain, robotics and virtual reality.SMACIT is intended as shorthand for the entire set of powerful, readily accessible digital technologies. How Big Old Companies Navigate Digital TransformationNew digital technologies present both game-changing opportunities for-and existential threats to-companies whose success was built in the pre-digital economy.This article describes our findings from a study of 25 companies that were embarking on digital transformation journeys.We identified two digital strategies-customer engagement and digitized solutions-that provide direction for a digital transformation.Two technology-enabled assets are essential for executing those strategies: an operational backbone and a digital services platform.We describe how a big old company can combine these elements to navigate its digital transformation. 1, 2