| dc.description.abstract | The European Commission published the Digital Single Market Strategy (DSM) on May 6, 2015. As new technologies rapidly change the way economies consume, progress and communicate, the implementation of the strategy demonstrates the EU´s will to deliver and complete the digital single market, where previous attempts have been less successful.The DSM rests on 16 policy initiatives across 3 policy areas – better access, encouraging businesses to grow and creating the right conditions to ensure the growth of the digital economy in the EU.
Although the Commission has made the DSM to one of its top ten politic priorities, policymakers struggle to keep up with the fast speed in which new technologies develop. Given the large scope of the strategy, the focus was put on the policy area that encourage Member States to digitalize their national economies. Therefore, this analysis seeks to expand on the question “How well does the European Digital Single Market Strategy and the Industry 4.0 Framework afford Digitalization Transformation? A Case Study of SAP SE” to examine whether digital transformations of businesses are captured by the strategy and the German Industry 4.0 framework using a case study of the German software firm of SAP as illustrative example.
The empirical findings demonstrate four major issues. First, digitalization has been fueled by the development of advanced technologies that inspired new customer demands, which ultimately encourage the process of digital transformation in businesses. Second, largely diverging and fragmented Member States digitalization legislations add complications and make it hard for the DSM to capture all legislation under one regulatory umbrella. Third, business processes and operations with multiple impacts require fundamental redesign and interact with the external market. This raises issues of data security and privacy that are not (yet) accurately captured by the DSM and Industry 4.0 framework. Forth, satisfaction of customers has the biggest impact crossing business boundaries and requires the redefinition of business scope and business model transformation. The analysis of the case study suggest that digital transformation can be captured when identifying distinctive business dimensions (namely customer, process, product and ecosystem dimensions) that are not captured by the DSM framework. | |
