The dinner offers rich opportunity to discuss the topic with the guest speakers, researchers from Aarhus BSS, and not least the other participants.

PRESENTATIONS

Making IT Matter: Digitized Platform Maturity, Organizational Agility and Firm Performance
Associate Director Nils Olaya Fonstad

The business environment is changing rapidly triggered by technological trends. New information and communication technologies (ICT), such as cloud-based services (“Cloud”), are promoted as critical resources for enhancing agility. However amidst all the attention given to new technologies, and changes associated with them, it is easy to lose sight of what remains of former investments in ICT. We will examine the benefits and risks of a firm’s digitized platform – i.e., the technologies, such as applications and infrastructure, digitized business processes and data that a firm has accumulated over time as it invested in ICT. This research, based on 300 companies, develops and empirically examines digitized platform maturity as an enterprise-wide IT-enabled resource that can lead to both positive and negative synergies with regards to business unit responsiveness to market opportunities and threats. The results reveal that on average, high investors in cloud with sufficiently high digitized platform maturity are twice as likely to be competitively agile than low investors, whereas high investors with immature digitized platforms perform no better than low investors. Our findings suggest that having a mature digitized platform is not just beneficial; it is necessary to avoid wasting investments in ICT and jeopardizing agility.

Dr. Nils Olaya Fonstad is Associate Director of INSEAD eLab, a global research center within INSEAD focused on how organizations from the public and private sectors create value from the digital economy.

Is Your Enterprise Architecture Lying to You?
Associate Professor Joao Vieira da Cunha

Companies design enterprise architectures to improve the information that managers have about their organization, about their employees and about their customers. But how much can managers trust this information? In this talk, I will discuss a case of a large scale IT implementation that did much more to impress than inform managers and explore the causes and the consequences of enterprise architectures that deceive managers into making wrong choices about their company's processes and technology's role therein.

Joao Vieira da Cunha is an Associate Professor at the European University in Lisbon where he heads the university's research institute and its doctoral school.

VENUE
Aarhus BSS
Fuglesangs Allé 4
8210 Aarhus V
Building 2610, Room S313

PLEASE NOTICE
You are welcome to bring a colleague, but the seating is limited to 25 guests for this event. Therefore, please notice that registration is needed no later than Friday 29 November.

It is no longer possible to register for the Executive dinner.