Progressing with Digital Transformation Endeavors - Towards Improved Governance

Todays organizations have to continuously transform themselves to survive in the rapidly changing environment. In particular, continuous, rapid developments of digital technologies are key drivers of these changes. They leave hardly any organization, even organizations with long traditions, unaffected. The resulting urge to progress with digital transformation has motivated many organizations to set up large-scale, enterprise-wide programs. However, successfully realizing these programs is far from an easy task. While program management as a discipline has significantly matured over the previous years, increasing the understanding of and improving program governance to ensure direction, coordination, and control of joint objectives in programs, has been neglected in both theory and practice. This dissertation studies governance in digital transformation programs. Firstly, it investigates the importance of program governance as a means of ensuring program success. Secondly, it studies the current shortcomings of program governance in the context of the concurrence of opposing agile and traditional management approaches within programs and in the context of the concurrence of opposing local and global interests of involved stakeholders. Thirdly, it provides insights into possible improvements and further developments of program governance based on tension theory. To gain rich empirical insights, all papers of this dissertation are based on a qualitative research approach. The dissertation is of value for researchers and practitioners: The findings of the papers constituting this dissertation contribute to a better understanding of why governance is important to successfully progress with digital transformation endeavors and how it can be improved through ensuring both context- and tension-awareness. This dissertation lays the foundation to further investigate and develop governance practice in temporary organizations set up to progress with enterprise-wide digital transformation.

Todays organizations have to continuously transform themselves to survive in the rapidly changing environment. In particular, continuous, rapid developments of digital technologies are key drivers of these changes. They leave hardly any organization, even organizations with long traditions, unaffected. The resulting urge to progress with digital transformation has motivated many organizations to set up large-scale, enterprise-wide programs. However, successfully realizing these programs is far from an easy task. While program management as a discipline has significantly matured over the previous years, increasing the understanding of and improving program governance to ensure direction, coordination, and control of joint objectives in programs, has been neglected in both theory and practice. This dissertation studies governance in digital transformation programs. Firstly, it investigates the importance of program governance as a means of ensuring program success. Secondly, it studies the current shortcomings of program governance in the context of the concurrence of opposing agile and traditional management approaches within programs and in the context of the concurrence of opposing local and global interests of involved stakeholders. Thirdly, it provides insights into possible improvements and further developments of program governance based on tension theory. To gain rich empirical insights, all papers of this dissertation are based on a qualitative research approach. The dissertation is of value for researchers and practitioners: The findings of the papers constituting this dissertation contribute to a better understanding of why governance is important to successfully progress with digital transformation endeavors and how it can be improved through ensuring both context- and tension-awareness. This dissertation lays the foundation to further investigate and develop governance practice in temporary organizations set up to progress with enterprise-wide digital transformation.