Change Management in the Digital Economy: Model Proposal

Introduction

The term “digital economy” refers to an economic model and society in which it is driven by computer technology (Alaerds, Grove, Besteman, & Bilderbeek, 2017). The Digital Economy shows great potential for growth within individuals in business-to-business transactions. Consumers today have a huge impact on the economy as we are in a society that is always online and well informed.

Achieving the desired growth requires Digital Transformation that generates new business, digital business models, industries and subsectors.

According to (Kling & Lamb, 1999), it is possible to identify four sectors:

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  Highly Digital goods and services: those goods that are delivered digitally and services where a substantial portion of the service is delivered digital is these include interbank fund transfers, online information services, electronic journals, some software sales, and so on;

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  Mixed digital goods and services: These include music, books and flowers via the Internet, as well as services such as travel reservations. While a significant fraction of some of these products, such as pop music, may be sold in purely digital form within the next decade, there is a durable market for tangible goods;

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  IT intensive services or goods production: Include services that depend critically upon IT to be provided, for an example the computerized control plant production software;

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  The Segments of the IT industry that support of these three segments of the Digital Economy: The goods and services of the IT industry that most directly support these three segments include a large fraction of the computer networking sub-industry, PC manufacturing, and some of the IT consulting organizations.

A digital component is added to existing sector/business activities and as the Digital Economy Model (Figure 1). This model takes the form of a layered chain or cycle and draws a distinction between sectors and components that deliver digital infrastructure, and create digital services, and consume digital services/infrastructure (see Figure 1). Digital infrastructure (digital delivery) consists of data as the raw material, the network sector, the data centre sector, and the cloud & hosting sector. Digital services are created by software and digital companies (digital creation). Digital data, infrastructure and services are purchased by businesses, consumers and the government (digital consumption), facilitated among other ways by linking on-premises IT infrastructure and devices such as smartphones, tablets. (Alaerds, Grove, Besteman, & Bilderbeek, 2017)

Figure 1.

Digital economy model (Alaerds, Grove, Besteman, & Bilderbeek, 2017)