Center for Digital Transformation

The Center for Digital Transformation is a community of scholars and executives investigating how the use of networked digital resources – data, sensors, and various computing platforms and access devices – alters competition, strategy, and execution.

Vision

By studying how firms compete in digital, networked environments, the Center for Digital Transformation will:

• Contribute to the state of scholarship with an innovative, cross-disciplinary, and robust research program
• Advance practitioners’ abilities to manage in digitally-enabled enterprises
• Increase students’ grasp of the challenges and possibilities of a digital economy, thereby situating them to shape and lead a generation of networked enterprises
• Initiate informed debate regarding far-reaching implications of networked commerce, including ubiquitous access, offshoring, and security and privacy
• Position the Smeal College of Business as a locus of intellectual vitality, practical wisdom, and public influence relative to digital business.

Context

The combination of digitization and anytime, anywhere broadband networks changes the enterprise in fundamental ways, from recruiting and retention, to investor relationships and regulatory oversight, and to the management of reputation and other intangible assets. In the end, such basic notions as work, assets, and transactions are challenged. Several clusters of management issues arise:

The Role of Services in a Digital Economy

Fifty years of corporate computing have coincided with the rise of the services sector to predominance in the U.S. economy. How does digitization relate to service design, provision, and management? How are customer expectations and perceptions of service changing on-screen and on-line? How do electronically delivered services reshape business models?

Global Networks of Competition and Cooperation

A digital business is defined by both its competencies and its connections. What are the implications for management of such distributed arrangements as offshoring, outsourcing, open-source, mobile workers, and telecommuting? How are such assets as data and talent managed in these scenarios? How do companies allocate or transfer responsibility and liability across a network of business partners? How should firms design processes, incentives, and governance models for multi-channel customer contact? As data becomes both a medium of exchange and a store of value, how is it managed across boundaries?

Measuring Performance

Managers and investors require new tools to evaluate the fitness of a digital business. What constitutes robustness in a global web of relationships, given the threats of terrorists and criminals, weather and viruses, regulation and rumor? What are various types of risk, how are they priced, and who is paid to bear them? How can emerging business models best be evaluated?

Managing Business Complexity

Constant innovation – by both good guys and bad guys – and the wide reach of today’s technological environment introduce hard problems that require both astute business sense and deep expertise. How do firms best manage such issues as data volume and validation, privacy and security assurance, energy consumption, and intellectual property?

Mission

Operating with funding jointly provided by the Smeal College of Business, industry, and government, the Center for Digital Transformation performs three functions.

Research

The Center serves as a point of contact between faculty investigators and business executives, cross-fertilizing emerging issues and new scholarship across several academic fields. Multi-company studies allow executives in different industries to gain perspective on common issues from diverse vantage points. Alternatively, industry-level studies can clarify and contextualize shared concerns. With a focus on the firm rather than on the functional area or the general economy, the Center's research is aimed both at senior executives with broad visibility and responsibility, and at professional journals to advance the overall state of learning.

Teaching

The Center influences both technology and management instruction with its cross-functional perspective, primarily in the MBA and executive education programs. Both content and modes of learning come into play: our students need to know the "what" and experience the "how" of digital environments. To this end, both instructional technology and service learning, including internships and academic year coursework, are emphasized. Topical areas of impact include marketing, entrepreneurship and innovation, supply chain, information management, and management and organization.

Outreach

The Center seeks to stimulate dialogue – across both industry and disciplinary lines – about the nature of competition in digital domains. Deep industry connections serve as a pathway for commercialization of University research. Talks by Smeal researchers at corporate meetings complement guest lectures by front-line executives in University Park. By facilitating such interactions, serving as a media resource, and raising questions for debate, the Center encourages public consideration of key decisions and emerging issues at the juncture of information, technology, and management.

January 2007, Early Indications Newsletter

Systems typically support and depend on other systems. An airline relies on banks for working capital, on hotel chains for traveler (and crew) accommodations, and on government for certifications of various sorts. If the government doesn't provide a certificate of airworthiness for a new plane, no bank will lend the money and an outside insurer won't underwrite the liability. A personal computer without a telecommunications system and an electric power grid is essentially useless. At a deeper level, a keyboard without a language and syntax of expressions, both grammatical and mechanical, is quickly reduced in value. These dependencies among systems, and the resulting complexities, drive our 2007 predictions.

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December 2006, Early Indications Newsletter

In January of this year, we published eight predictions. At this point, the score is six hits, an incomplete, and a slight miss. . . .

On the mis-step front, the litany of privacy breaches became longer and louder, with a stolen laptop costing the U.S. Veteran's Administration a projected $160 million dollars had it not been found. In the midst of absorbing losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars because of defective batteries, Sony launched an expensive, powerful gaming platform that it couldn't supply in holiday quantities. The "netroot" bloggers made a lot of noise but in the end did not get their U.S. Senate candidate elected.

Review the entire newsletter (.pdf 150Kb)*Acrobat, which includes subscription information.