The Embedding of Chief Digital Officers in Organizations' Top Management Teams

Companies increasingly employ Chief Digital Officers to manage their digital transformation. This book explores how to effectively embed them in the organization to fully realize their potential.

Digital transformation poses significant challenges for companies across all industries, including volatile customer demands, shifts in competitive dynamics, and upheavals of established business models. In response, the Chief Digital Officer role has emerged as a strategic approach for centrally driving digital transformation efforts. While research recognizes the pivotal role of Chief Digital Officers in facilitating digital transformation, the complexity of digital initiatives precludes the expectation that one individual senior executive can manage them single-handedly. This calls for a thorough investigation of Chief Digital Officers' embedding in organizations' top management teams. Despite the diversity of related issues, they have thus far received sporadic attention, thereby limiting our understanding of how Chief Digital Officers are integrated in the upper echelons to manage digtal transformation. This cumulative dissertation delves into the embedding of Chief Digital Officers in organizations' top management teams by examining the topic from various perspectives. Specifically, it leverages the digital transformation governance framework, incorporating structural, procedural, and relational viewpoints across the projects. Through this comprehensive approach, the studies enrich our theoretical insights into the multifaceted integration of Chief Digital Officers within organizations. Additionally, this dissertation provides practical implications for companies appointing Chief Digital Officers to spearhead digital transformation, addressing the challenges they face in executing their digital agendas. In particular, it is acknowledged that Chief Digital Officers are not a one-size-fits-all solution for digital transformation. Instead, they must be adeptly integrated into the organization to fully unleash the role's potential.

Autorentext
Christian Sciuk promovierte an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München, wo er als wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Institut für Digitales Management und Neue Medien (DMM) tätig war. An der LMU absolvierte Christian Sciuk ferner ein postgraduales Studium zum Master of Business Research (MBR) und einen Master in Betriebswirtschaftslehre (M.Sc.). Zuvor erlangte er einen Bachelor in Global Business Management (B.Sc.) an der Universität Augsburg. Sein Forschungsschwerpunkt liegt auf der Rolle des Chief Digital Officers in der digitalen Transformation von Unternehmen. Seine Arbeit ist in den Proceedings verschiedener renommierter internationaler Konferenzen erschienen, wie der International Conference on Information Systems und der Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.