IT Managers' Perception and Response to Digital Disruption: An Exploratory Study

TL;DR

This study explores how IT managers perceive and respond to digital disruption, revealing their perceptions and strategic responses in an Australian university setting, emphasizing the importance of dynamic capabilities.

Contribution

It applies situational awareness and disruptive innovation theories to understand IT managers' perceptions and responses to digital disruption in a specific organizational context.

Findings

IT managers perceive digital disruption from technological, learning, and sense-making perspectives.

First-order responses address resources, processes, and value issues.

Second-order responses focus on building dynamic capabilities.

Abstract

Digital disruption introduces technology-enabled changes at a pace and scale that fundamentally shifts established ways in which we live and work. Given the impact of digital disruption can span the individual, organisational, industry and societal levels, it has received growing attention in Information Systems. A less researched area of digital disruption, however, is the perspective of IT managers in organisations. This paper draws on i) situational awareness theory to identify IT managers' perceptions of digital disruption, and ii) disruptive innovation theory to identify IT managers' responses to digital disruption. A case study of senior IT managers in an Australian university identifies that IT managers perceive digital disruption from the technological, learning and sense-making perspectives. IT managers' first-order responses to digital disruption were shown to address resource, process and value-based issues while second-order responses focused on the need to build dynamic capabilities in order to be prepared for future digital disruption.