Organizations in the Digital Transformation: essays on the impact of digital data-rich environments on organizational capabilities and performance

Contemporary organizations have to face a technological scenario characterized by the so-called Digital Transformation. One of the main consequences is a massive expansion of data available in the different digital channels. These information assets are accessible to all organizations, but not all of them are able to extract value from digital data. Recent reports by major IT consulting firms have claimed that the deployment of digital data inside organizations can lead to superior performance. But at the same time the organization and management theory literature displays substantial gaps about these issues. The present thesis aims to fill some of these gaps, first of all developing a theoretical framework, rooted in management and organizational literature, which is able to explain the organizational systems, processes and capabilities needed to extract value from the actual data-rich environment. Then three empirical essays are developed to answer to the research questions investigated in this thesis. A survey was developed, pre-tested, refined and sent to a sample of 1200 Italian firms drawn by a state-of-art commercial database of the Italian limited company. The response rate was 20.9% for a final sample of 251 respondents. With these data three theoretical models are developed in order to test different sets of hypotheses related to the deployment of digital data analytics inside organizations. The results suggest that the deployment of digital analytics systems and activities is fundamental to make sense of digital data and to gain superior performance. Moreover, these studies underline the central role of organizational capabilities, inter-functional integration and personnel analytics skills as mediators between digital analytics deployment and organizational performance.