Digital Transformation in Business and Society

Businesses are being transformed in fundamental ways as a result of the data revolution and societal drivers of change. The new era inaugurated by digital 2.0 technologies created a discontinuity and a fundamental shift in our ideas of business and society. Fundamental concepts that constituted the definitional parameters of business are undergoing a re-definition process. Technological revolutions brought to us increase in processing power, bandwidth, user-friendly interfaces with technology, the ‘internet of things’, to list a few benefits. Also, we live in a society that loves to consume radical change. These drivers together have transformed our situated existence in the human society. For businesses, these changes mean the blurring of industry boundaries, modular business architectures, distributed innovation micro-structures, ‘just-in-time’ definitions of business performance, among others.

Smart cities arose from the smart growth movement of the United States in the 1980s. Asian smart cities are used to focus more on technology rather than human and governance initiatives. During the period between 2010 and 2017, we attended numerous smart-city seminars, and also visited more than 40 international cities in Asia, Europe, and North America, and interviewed citizens about their respective cities in the world. We extensively reviewed literature about smart cities and criticized how the development of smart cities exacerbated social and economic divides in places where there was an absence of robust civil institutions and civil engagements. We chose two Asian smart-city exemplars, Singapore and Songdo in the Republic of Korea, to illustrate how the central-government-led smart-city industry policy was taking away citizens’ rights to be consulted and heard. Smart cities can easily be controlled by corporations. A new paradigm, that is, community-led urban growth, is advocated. Information and communications technology (ICT) is used to empower people and the community to exercise their choices and to be engaged in the economic, social, and political activities in smart cities. We affirm the importance of the development of citizens rather than consumers in our teaching and research. We need to help students to know how to navigate in the mass ocean of digitized data about urban imaginaries by asking questions related to our innate human capacities and well-being. It is essential for Hong Kong policy makers to develop trusting relationships with their citizens through responsible data policy, open and collaborative governance structure, and heavy investment in humanity initiatives.

Employees are an asset for any organization. As the employees are the possessors and the processors of the knowledge that is circulated within an organization, the decisions made by them can lead to the success of the organization, especially when they are made with accuracy and meticulousness. Knowledge management (KM) is instrumental in fostering the symbiosis of tacit and explicit knowledge in a business, which can be used to make valuable decisions for ensuring the success of the organization. These decisions are extremely significant when it comes to tiding over crises through strategizing and reinventing. Big data can serve to scrutinize, organize, and arrange the colossal amount of available data present in the form of knowledge in order to filter out the best and most valuable information, thus giving the organization a competitive edge. The present chapter aims to understand the relationship between big data and KM, and also how big data can serve as an enabler for effective KM.

In social media marketing, emphasis needs to be placed on creating and adopting effective strategies that can generate electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) and make the brand go viral. This study, therefore, identifies a series of available strategies for harnessing the power of the social media for firms to stimulate their marketing efforts. Firstly, as with any communication exercise, it is necessary to plan social media marketing campaigns extensively before their launch. Also, in contrast to traditional marketing, which involves limited customer participation, managers need to develop new forms of advertorial content that encourage user engagement. Further, it is necessary to create separate strategies for each social media channel, employ the right people to spread the message, form virtual communities of individuals with common interests, and design products and services that create buzz. To further stimulate eWOM, the marketing message must be sufficiently memorable and trigger the consumer’s emotions. Marketing managers must leverage on emotional connections, provide exclusivity, harness the power of stories, solicit feedbacks, and increase social media presence. Finally, social media marketing must be complemented with the rest of the marketing communications mix.

Firms are internationalising, leveraging on social media marketing, but scholars posit that technology solely cannot lead to export performance unless it is integrated with other strategic resources. Using the resource-advantage theory, this chapter seeks to address the question on the appropriate resource combinations enabling firms to achieve export performance. It further introduces export relationship performance as a dimension for evaluating the performance of exporting small- and medium-scale enterprises on social media. Additionally, the chapter presents a framework on social media export marketing performance capabilities.

The purpose of this research is to inform readers about data analytics and predictive analytics through their various applications and examples of their benefits. Technology is becoming more integrated into daily life, and the amount of data that is obtained and processed by that technology is quite robust. Most people with accounts that are connected to the Internet have their data collected by these companies. Then, they either package and sell the data or use it for marketing purposes. Also, data analytics is an integral part of artificial intelligence development. Despite predominantly being used for marketing other companies, such as healthcare, providers can use existing healthcare information to predict the development of other future complications. This field is vast and growing at a rapid rate, with more technological devices becoming commonplace. Thus, it is essential to understand the benefits and drawbacks of this technology, as it will be an integral aspect of life in the coming years.

The whole business world is undergoing continuous transformation due to the innovations taking place in the business process and models as part of digital transformation. Earlier worries about ‘digital disruptions’ are not annoying anyone anymore and everyone is in a race to leverage the changes and opportunities of digital technologies at their best for the benefit of their organization and people. The percentage of ‘digital natives’ among various groups of stakeholders such as consumers, employees, and so on is showing a phenomenal increase and poses a greater challenge to the business organizations in terms of building loyalty and commitment among the people concerned. The intention, behavior, and involvement of digital natives in digital platforms and their use are characteristically different from others such as ‘digital immigrants’ or mere ‘digital literates.’ This chapter attempts to throw some light on how to manage digital natives both as internal and external stakeholders of the business. The authors elaborate on various ways and means, including the extent of application of the advantages of social media, for engaging digital natives both as a consumer and as an employee. Skills and abilities needed for employees to make a successful digital transition are also narrated.

Most people in the future will not need to work, at least in the ways in which we continue to think about work/human labour. In this chapter, we discuss the role of humans in the future economy. We begin with a discussion of the evolution of the integration of robots into the economy. Then, we turn our attention to the economics of robotics and artificial intelligence, showing how these technological changes alter the economy and how markets and political responses may unfold. Then we discuss how humans can remain competitive in the new economy, developing skills that are needed, and how educational institutions will have to change to address the new economic reality. Finally, we conclude, showing that humans will have to see their relationship to the job market differently and there will have to be an appropriate political response to the new economic landscape with changes in taxation and new ways of ensuring economic and political stability.

New information technologies enable big data collection, analysis, and forecasting. Based on big data, firms now have the capability to manipulate consumers, deliver personalized advertisements, and apply price discrimination policies. On the other hand, concerns about personal privacy and data security arise with big data. This chapter discusses concerns regarding the dark side of big data through observations of results for consumers led by firms sharing and using these data.

This research contributes to financial inclusion campaigns initiated by the World Bank as an operational solution for poverty eradication in developing and emerging economies. The findings of this study can help policy makers to understand the issues related to the prompt expansion of digital financial services, strategies for its effective delivery to the poor and the risks involved in digital financial inclusion. Secondly, this study adds to the existing literatures on emerging digital finance and financial inclusion, which will enable academics and researchers to attend to the effects of digital financial services on financial inclusion.

Substantial improvements in technology have been influencing not only strategies and structures of firms but also consumers’ social and economic lives. In terms of the former, in order to respond to the alterations in the technological environment, and ultimately, to stay ahead of the competition, firms have been making continuous attempts to fit their internal resources and competencies with the external circumstances. Concerning the latter, having an enormous impact on the manner of communicating, consuming, and progressing, technological advancements have been shaping consumers’ daily lives. Specifically, digital technology has affected consumers’ routines and habits, which in turn has led to changes in consumer behavior. In today’s highly digitalized environment, it is indisputable that technological developments considerably influence how both firms and consumers behave. Notably, the extensive usage of the Internet and, ultimately, consumers’ growing involvement in digital devices have led to noticeable changes in consumer behavior by affecting the ways to communicate, consume, and progress. Together with these, the roles of firms and consumers have significantly altered, which in turn have yielded to the increase in the importance of digital marketing activities in general, and online customer experiences, e-customer relationship management, and customer co-creation practices, in particular.

The purport of this chapter is to evaluate the national open government data (OGD) portal of the United Arab Emirates (https://​bayanat.​ae/​). OGD relates to the provision of datasets by the government bodies via dedicated online portals in a bid to promote citizen participation, administrative transparency and administrative efficiency. Hitherto, the datasets were stored in government repositories and remained inaccessible to the public. It is anticipated that the published datasets might be useful for the stakeholders (citizens, private sector professionals, professionals from non-governmental organizations, software developers, etc.) for deriving value out of the same. Specifically, the chapter invokes two frameworks—the usability framework (Machova, Hub, & Lnenicka, Aslib Journal of Information Management. https://​doi.​org/​10.​1108/​AJIM-02-2018-0026, 2018), underlining the need for maintaining the quality of the datasets published online, and the website quality framework (Sorum, Andersen, & Clemmensen, Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy, 7(3), 322–341, 2013), underlining the need to maintain the user-friendliness tenet of a government website. The findings from the study suggest that there are several hindrances as far as the re-use of datasets by a large section of stakeholders is concerned.

This study explores the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics technology in the hospitality industry. After reviewing and evaluating research and articles, currently, robotics technology has been broadly applied into hotel, food and beverage, and meeting and convention; these are the three major segments in the hospitality industry. The impacts of AI and robotics technology on workforce, customers, and corporations are examined. Further, the authors explore the potential use of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics technology. In the end of this literature review, the factors and the risks of robot industry are discussed.

This study therefore investigates the way the banking sector is exploiting technology in order to reduce missed opportunities and realized risks, whether technology has been exploited in order to integrate different systems, by collecting and analyzing massive volumes of data from an unlimited number of sources across multiple locations. Essentially, our research question was answered through the use of content analysis of integrated reports of selected Nigerian banks where the focus is on the manner and the way in which risks have been captured. We content-analyze this section of the integrated report in order to determine whether Nigerian banks indicated in these reports have deployed technology or not and whether or not advanced technology would have been deployed in order to reduce missed opportunities and realized risks.

Digital transformation is fundamentally influencing all aspects of business and society. It can enable individuals and organizations to transcend from one way of working to another. In construction, emphasis is shifting from project management to project leadership, as professionals need assisting tools to not only aid in managing tasks and activities, but aid in leading people. As such, the adoption of digital technologies may hold the key in taking project leadership practice into the future. To date, there have been few attempts to explore the potential of digital technology as an aid for project leadership development and practice. This research therefore aims to investigate this potential in the context of the Australian civil construction industry. We review the existing body of knowledge on both industry-specific leadership demands and relevant digital technology capabilities to identify areas of improvement and to guide interviews with construction project managers. So far, literature has focused on endorsing particular leadership behaviors and/or styles, while ignoring the difficulties faced by professionals in practicing these behaviors. We find that project managers of civil contractors within Sydney understand the significance of leadership but are often overwhelmed by its complexity.

Cities are often multi-cultural and multi-ethnic melting pots with strong ecological resources that make them dynamic urban tourism destinations. Driven by digital and green technologies, today’s cities are becoming smarter and sustainable, attracting a new generation of digitally savvy yet ecologically conscious travellers. This study provides a conceptual overview of the connection between technology and sustainability in urban tourism contexts. Firstly, it provides an understanding on the mainly identified dimensions of sustainability in urban tourism contexts—urban ecotourism, food tourism, urban culturescapes and smart transport. These dimensions encompass types of attractions that reflect ecological and social sustainability in urban tourism contexts. Secondly, the dimensions of technologies applied in urban tourism contexts have been discussed, which includes Wi-Fi- and data-connectivity-enabled social media and user-generated content at attraction sites, gamification opportunities in urban tourism sites, mobile-based learning opportunities, green energy technologies and green/soft mobility technologies. The underlying strong interconnections and inter-relationships between technology and sustainability in terms of digital learning experiences for tourists, soft mobility technologies and state-of-the-art green technologies embedded in urban ecotourism attractions, as well as collaborative and co-creative tourist practices enabled by social media, have been broadly discussed.