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Objective and main results

This article explores how Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) in different organizations make sense of, legitimize, and enact this emerging role. The authors discuss how CDOs drive digital innovation efforts and how they reconcile their role with existing institutional arrangements.

Main findings:

• CDOs intentionally draw on the term ‘‘digital’’ to distance themselves from IT professionals. They articulate and develop the emerging ‘‘digital’’ logic of action to legitimize their role and mobilize resources. The authors describe five dimensions along which CDOs distinguish their logic of action: Focus of control, value orientation, goal achievement, value chain location, and reference industry.  
• They enact this digital logic through different strategies to navigate tensions between the existing and emerging approaches to innovation with digital technologies. The authors discuss three general approaches to how CDOs reconcile their activity with that of the IT profession: Grafting, bridging, and decoupling.

Summary of practical implications

It is becoming crucial to recognize how divergent logics in organizations can shape innovation with digital technologies. The different practices associated with the divergent logics need to be managed appropriately.

A new executive role (CDO) is not inevitable to achieve this, but organizations either way need to consider basic cultural elements, mindsets and rituals that characterize the involved professional backgrounds.    

For those organizations that do implement a role as Chief Digital Officer, it is important to note that this role can be enacted in different ways (with different advantages and drawbacks that need to be considered). The Grafting approach involves leveraging and tightly connecting to the existing IT function. Bridging involves creating a separate collaborate (boundary spanning) digital initiative that integrates different existing units/functions (typically IT and Marketing). Decoupling implies isolating the CDO’s organization from outside scrutiny, allowing it to form on its own terms.

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Tags

Digital innovation