A Strategic View on Intertwining Digital and Physical Materialities Across Lifecycles of Products and Services

Authors

Abstract

Opportunities to use virtual, augmented, and mixed reality (VAM-R) are emerging in various sectors of the economy. To seize them, managers need to develop comprehensive strategies that intertwine digital and physical forms of materiality. This paper proposes a way to assess and steer the transfor-mations of the reality-virtuality continuum across lifecycles of products and services. Our approach identifies use cases for VAM-R according to the (1) strategic imperative, (2) physical materiality, (3) reality-virtuality assessment, (4) digital materiality, (5) information value, and (6) project portfo-lio. The findings result from three action research cycles in manufacturing and healthcare. For theory, we propose a framework to evaluate the reality-virtuality continuum and guide VAM-R transfor-mations. For practice, we propose and test an artefact accessible to domain experts with different backgrounds, and a sequence of steps to assist managers in their digitalization strategies with VAM-R. Lifecycle approaches offer an alternative perspective to situational transformation, potentially im-proving the pervasiveness of organizational changes using information technologies.

Keywords

digital strategy, digital transformation, reality-virtuality continuum, VAM-R

Subject

Information systems, Sociomateriality

Conference

Twenty-Seventh European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), June 2019