Structuring digital transformation. A framework of action fields and its application at ZEISS

Digital products and services are an integral part of everyday life for both individuals and organizations. Further, given that digitalization greatly impacts our society and in particular how customer and organizations interact, organizations need to react to changing business rules and to leverage opportunities associated with digital technologies. Accordingly, the chief information officer (CIO) role is frequently a flexible one in the sense that it encompasses a much broader perspective on organizations than before. Most of the CIOs or newly appointed chief digital officers (CDOs) whom we interviewed in the course of our study recognized the need for change catalyzed by emerging digital technologies, but they typically lacked comprehensive knowledge on how to scope digital transformation initiatives. Against this background, we develop and validate a holistic framework of action fields for digital transformation. Our framework builds on extant literature and a series of exploratory interviews with over 50 organizations, and we have validated it in numerous contexts. In this paper, we present our framework and demonstrate its application at ZEISS, one of the organizations that participated in our study.