Digital Fluency in SMEs: A Typology and a Multi-Case Study

In the practitioner and the academic literatures, links between information technology (IT) adoption, IT use and digital fluency (DF) have been emphasized by a number of authors. However, there is a lack of understanding of what exactly digital fluency is, how it can be conceptualized and what role it plays in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Based on the DF literature and its underlying concepts such as skills, expertise and competencies, as well as on the SME literature, a multi-case study of three Canadian SMEs is conducted to empirically evaluate a typology of DF archetypes. The typology, that is based on a change agent perspective, has three archetypes. Results suggest that SMEs’ managers should focus on the complementarity nature of the cognitive, social, and technological dimensions of DF when assessing and developing their employees’ DF.