Imperatives of Business Models and Digital Transformation for Digital Services Providers

Abstract

Despite the increasing pace of digital transformation initiatives across many industry verticals, lack of understanding among business leadership is cited as one of the major barriers for successful implementation of business transformation. This article explores the imperatives of business models and digital transformation from practical perspective and proposes an improvised business model framework with particular focus on digital services providers. Extant literature covering the trends of business models and digital transformation were reviewed qualitatively along with select reports pertaining to challenges faced by communications service providers. Key findings of this article suggest, a practical framework and business model representation to mitigate the challenges of business models and digital transformation. The authors believe, such an approach shall open up new and innovative opportunities for communication service providers to become true digital service providers which will help their business customers to plan and empirically progress with their business transformation efforts.

Digital business model innovation: toward construct clarity and future research directions

“…We make the following observations. First, some of the proposed definitions use unclear terms-terms that are also lacking construct clarity, such as digital technology (Veit et al 2014;Aagaard 2019), digital marketplace (Venkatesh et al 2019), or personalized products (Morabito 2014). Looking at the preconditions of good definitions as prescribed by Suddaby (2010), we notice that some of these descriptions do not meet the criteria of effectively capturing the essential properties of a construct.…”

“…Digitalization is affecting almost all industries by creating opportunities and challenges for established firms, large born digitals, and smaller start-ups (Rachinger et al 2018;Volberda et al 2021). Industry players as well as consumers are becoming increasingly smart through the proliferation of digital technologies, such as those related to the Internet of Things, and the acceptance and use of affordable mobile devices and personal computers (Fichman et al 2014;Parida et al 2019;Venkatesh et al 2019). Competition is intensifying, and the pace of change is accelerating as more agile start-ups make use of the low entry barriers in digital markets and enter industries that were dominated by incumbents (Loebbecke and Picot 2015;Ehret and Wirtz 2017;Teece and Linden 2017).…”

“…However, despite its importance in the digital transformation of firms, research on DBMI is still in its infancy, and the phenomenon remains poorly understood (Rachinger et al 2018;Aagaard 2019;Parida et al 2019;Li 2020). A major concern in this respect is the low level of construct clarity regarding the concept of DBMI (Venkatesh et al 2019), as a common definition of DBMI is missing (Schallmo and Williams 2018;Bican and Brem 2020). Scholars have regularly criticized the lack of consistent terminology (Blaschke et al 2016;Standing and Mattsson 2018) or the persistent ambiguity (Veit et al 2014;Kohli and Melville 2019), and have emphasized that confusion regarding the construct of DBMI is paramount (Bican and Brem 2020).…”

Digital marketing for B2B organizations: structured literature review and future research directions

“…In fact, until recently, many organizations believed that digital marketing is useful only to B2C organizations (Lacka and Chong, 2016). However, digital marketing success stories from B2B firms such as Cisco and IBM (Venkatesh et al , 2019) have gradually changed this perception. Organizations have come to realize that digital marketing in the B2B space enhances flow of information and trust among customers (Krishna and Singh, 2018; Pandey, 2015).…”

E-marketing in MSMEs Managed by Elderly Adults and Young Adults in Aguascalientes, Mexico

“…In this setting, we find in Vieira, Almeida, Agnihotri and Arunachalam (2019) different studies that relate E-MKT with business success in the Business to customers (B2C) environment and that focus on brand building and the consumer journey, which implies purchasing and post-purchase activities in the context of developed economies, (Stephen & Galak, 2012;Li & Kannan, 2014;Dinner, Heerde & Neslin, 2014;Maldonado, Garza, Pinzon & Kumar, 2017;Colicev, Malshe, Pauwels & Oconnor, 2018), in addition to some with a focus on emerging economies (Maldonado et al, 2017). However, although E-MKT was initially believed to help organizations or commerce activities of B2C companies, the success stories of E-MKT in business-to-business (B2B) companies have gradually changed this (Venkatesh, Mathew & Singhal, 2019).…”