Organizational Evolution - How Digital Disruption Enforces Organizational Agility

The success of almost any business depends on the promotion of digital excellence. Disruptive technologies like Hadoop, IoT, Blockchain or DevOps pose completely new challenges for business development. While there is no doubt about the need for keeping pace with the technical progress it is blurry how much this affects leadership and organizational agility. At least in Germany, many analysts record a gap between the engineering innovativeness and an inadequate digital leadership. It is evident, that digitization leads to new occupational profiles and a specific stress on the organizational fabric. Many companies experiment with start-up culture, entrepreneurial responsibility and more flexible team patterns, but a consistent approach for manager is still missing. In this preliminary discussion we address three dimensions to increase a company's agility in times of digital Darwinism: structural flexibility, software-driven occupational profiles and requirements for leadership. (C) 2018, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.