Introduction to Digital Business

Welcome to Introduction to Digital Business, a thrilling new text on the fourth industrial revolution and its intersections with business, organizational strategy, and digital transformation and change.

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 and digital 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.

Introduction to Digital Business is a smaller companion text to the upcoming Digital Business by the same authors, which provides an expanded Part V on digital transformation and change and contains other material. Together, these texts are essential reading for our time, appropriate and important for managers and business owners, business students, consultants, 4IR experts, and others who are affected by the ongoing technological revolution of our era.