MIS Quarterly, 2013, Volume 37,
Issue 2, Page 655-662.
Digital business strategies (DBS) offer significant opportunities for firms to enhance competitiveness. Unlike the large proprietary systems of the 1980s, today's "micro-applications" allow firms to create and reconfigure digital capabilities to appropriate short-term competitive advantage. In the quest to provide value to customers through digitization, such applications can be efficiently deployed. However, we propose that in the long-term not all digitization is desirable. Indiscriminate digital initiatives through the use of micro-applications by a firm could "reveal its hand" to competitors and erode competitiveness. We propose that a firm's DBS must balance its system-software, process, and information-visibility with the ability to appropriate value from such systems. Through a visibility-value framework, and examples drawn from practice, this article illustrates the tradeoffs involved in making these choices as the firm traverses a dynamic business environment. In doing so, it raises sensitivity to an important caveat in digital environments epitomized by hyper-competition and transparency.
Keywords: digital business strategy; flexibility; phasing