Project IT-MOD

Emerging Trends and Practices in Diffusion Process and Dynamics of IT and Digital Technologies

About the Project

This project aims to strengthen a nascent collaboration within UCA as regards digital transformation in organizations and businesses IT modernization on our local territory. While digital changes had been largely studied in the economics and management literature, our aim here is to focus on one type of digital change that is currently observable in the reality of markets; yet less discussed by scholars. That is: IT change imposed to a firm or an organization by an external actor. To a large extent, this issue raises the question of the governance of large IT projects (often called megaprojects) and IT modernization in large (often conservative) organizations. Building up on existing expertise in the domain by the different project partners, the objective of this 1 year eventual funded project is to conduct an in-depth case-study of the recent local SAP strategy to lead its clients to cloud governance structure. This imposed form of change by SAP to its clients fits issues such as: the governance structure that links the modernizer (SAP) and the modernizees (its clients); the relative informal power that characterizes the relation between both actors as well as the different triggers to pull to facilitate change. Resulting from this in-depth qualitative case-study, our project seeks to challenge existing results and raises new generative mechanisms that could explain accepted change by the modernizee. In particular, the analysis will focus on the case of Schneider Electric, as one of the current modernizee (SAP client on their cloud transformation).