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Journal ArticleDOI

How a firm's competitive environment and digital strategic posture influence digital business strategy

TLDR
This paper examines how the competitive industry environment shapes the way that digital strategic posture (defined as a focal firm's degree of engagement in a particular class of digital business practices relative to the industry norm) influences firms' realized digital business strategy.
Abstract
In this paper, we examine how the competitive industry environment shapes the way that digital strategic posture (defined as a focal firm's degree of engagement in a particular class of digital business practices relative to the industry norm) influences firms' realized digital business strategy. We focus on two forms of digital strategy: general IT investment and IT outsourcing investment. Drawing from prior literature on determinants of IT activity and competitive dynamics, we argue that three elements of the industry environment determine whether digital strategic posture has an increasingly convergent or divergent influence on digital business strategy. By divergent influence, we mean an influence that leads to spending substantially more or less on a particular strategic activity than industry norms. We predict that a digital strategic posture (difference from the industry mean) has an increasingly divergent effect on digital business strategy under higher industry turbulence, while having an increasingly convergent effect on digital business strategy under higher industry concentration and higher industry growth. The study uses archival data for 400 U.S.-based firms from 1999 to 2006. Our findings imply that digital business strategy is not solely a matter of optimizing firm operations internally or of responding to one or two focal competitors, but also arises strikingly from awareness and responsiveness to the digital business competitive environment. Collectively, the findings provide insights on how strategic posture and industry environment influence firms' digital business strategy.

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Citations
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The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them, and describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative.
Journal ArticleDOI

Digital business strategy: toward a next generation of insights

TL;DR: The time is right to rethink the role of IT strategy, from that of a functional-level strategy--aligned but essentially always subordinate to business strategy--to one that reflects a fusion between IT strategy and business strategy, herein termed digital business strategy.
Journal ArticleDOI

Understanding digital transformation: A review and a research agenda

TL;DR: A framework of digital transformation articulated across eight building blocks is built that foregrounds digital transformation as a process where digital technologies create disruptions triggering strategic responses from organizations that seek to alter their value creation paths while managing the structural changes and organizational barriers that affect the positive and negative outcomes of this process.
Journal ArticleDOI

Aligning with new digital strategy: A dynamic capabilities approach

TL;DR: A longitudinal analysis of a B2B company's journey to enact its B2C digital strategy, using the dynamic capabilities approach, results in an aligning process model that is comprised of three phases (exploratory, building, and extending) and generalizable organizational aligning actions that form the organization's sensing, seizing, and transforming capacities.
Journal ArticleDOI

Digital transformation strategy making in pre-digital organizations: The case of a financial services provider

TL;DR: This model theorizes an integrated process/activity model that characterizes DTS formulation and implementation in pre-digital organizations and shows that the crafting of a DTS is a highly dynamic process involving iterating between learning and doing.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure

TL;DR: In this article, the authors draw on recent progress in the theory of property rights, agency, and finance to develop a theory of ownership structure for the firm, which casts new light on and has implications for a variety of issues in the professional and popular literature.
Book ChapterDOI

The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them, and describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative.
Book

A Guide to Econometrics

TL;DR: The fourth edition of "A Guide to Econometrics" provides an overview of the subject and an intuitive feel for its concepts and techniques without the notation and technical detail often characteristic of econometric textbooks.
Book

How information gives you competitive advantage

TL;DR: Most general managers know that the revolution is under way, and few dispute its importance as mentioned in this paper, however, they don't know how to take advantage of this knowledge and their ability to become involved in the management of new technology.
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Trending Questions (2)
How does competitive dynamics influence industrial strategy?

The paper does not directly address how competitive dynamics influence industrial strategy.

What are the determinants of firm performance of digital business?

The determinants of firm performance in digital business include industry turbulence, industry concentration, and industry growth.