Abstract Although research into the digitalization of business has grown in recent years, the focus has predominantly been on the impacts of digitalization on business in general, and not on the business relationship digitalization process. In this dissertation, the author addresses how digitalization affects business relationships and provides an illustration of the process of business relationships digitalization in the steel processing industry context. Drawing from the Industrial Marketing and Purchasing based business relationship literature and evolving digitalization literature the author develops a framework that includes six factors and their characteristics that describe the digitalization of business relationships. This dissertation also provides pertinent managerial insights into select business relationships to be digitalized as well as offers guidelines to digitalize chosen business relationships. The dissertation is divided into three parts. The theoretical elaboration presented in part one of the dissertation identifies and illustrates two important theoretical discussions underlying business relationship digitalization. These are the business relationships perspective and digitalization literature composed of information systems and information technology literature, electronic commerce, and electronic business discussions. Based on these, a preliminary framework is developed. In part two, the preliminary framework is applied to the selected industry, i.e. the steel processing industry. The two case studies from the steel processing industry provide the empirical material according to which the preliminary framework is compared and modified. In part three, the empirically grounded framework is depicted and the theoretical results reveal that business relationship digitalization is a complex process and that there are six factors: antecedents, accelerants, inhibitors, decision, digitalization, the outcome of event and their characteristics that influence the degree of business relationship digitalization and digitalization process. It is also noteworthy that digitalization success is dependent on many inter-organizational contingencies, such as interpersonal trust and the digitalizability of the exchange process. Additionally, the managerial results highlight the importance of systematically managing important business relationships and their digitalization. Furthermore, it is pinpointed that digitalization usually enhances existing business relationships by enabling faster and more accurate communication as well as more efficient transactions. To conclude, the dissertation provides several conceptual and managerial insights into business relationship digitalization. The author also suggests future studies around this emerging phenomenon.

Digitalization has transformed our society and reshaped the way that people live their life. It has affected our personal lives but also created a new business climate which most companies have embraced in order to survive. IKEA are one of many companies which have decided to embark on a digital journey and re-shape their business strategy. The uncertainty of the effects of digitalization have laid the groundwork for this thesis purpose. “The purpose of this report is to analyze how digitalization has changed IKEAs service offerings, and what effects it has had on the different instances internally”.    Digitalization is not a new phenomenon, however, as digitalization itself evolves there lies an opportunity in analyzing digitalization from the perspective of a traditional company such as IKEA. Traditional companies, and especially IKEA, are highly dependent on their retail stores. As digitalization open up the possibility of purchasing products and services online, we want to further analyze the effects on IKEA. The research has been conducted through a qualitative approach, where insightful interviews have helped us get a deeper understanding on the topic and answer our question of how it has affected IKEA. An abductive approach then enabled the usage of previous literature to be used in combination with our empirical findings and be analyzed.    The theory chapter discusses the topic of digitalization and digital transformation. It then includes previous research on the subject of change management. The conceptual framework provides a tool to analyze the effects of change through the lens of digitalization. In the analysis chapter, the empirical findings are compared and contrasted with the help of our theoretical framework. We then draw conclusions which are presented together with the practical and theoretical implications of the study, as well as the limitations and suggestions for future research.    The outcome of this study has provided an insight to the effects that IKEAs digital transformation journey has had on the internal structure of the organization. Our findings suggest that digitalization has forced IKEA to alter their service offering, which in turn has led to effects on the internal structure of the organization. These effects have led to improved internal communication, a rearranging of management structure, implementation of new technology and re-development of tasks for the employees

Since the digital revolution in the 1990s, scholars are increasingly debating the use of digital technologies in their research and data dissemination. This new era of scholarship, "digital humanities", has promoted the use of data visualization, info-graphics, data animation and interactive maps to promote and make visible scholarship. This thesis uses digital technologies to explore the possibilities for digitalizing modern Mexican history. By using Mexican historical events as case studies, it argues that data visualizations promote the accessibility of scholarly research and a more popular history, while remaining transparent.

Healthcare around the world is facing strenuous times, whereby there is a need for reduced costs, improved efficiency, and effectiveness. Digitalization is a transformational phenomenon argued to solve the many problems of healthcare. As of such, this thesis studies digitalization in a healthcare setting - considering how digitalization is achieved in practice, and what elements hamper and enable sociotechnical changes required for digitalization. To study these aspects, a qualitative case study was carried out on the recently implemented mandatory electronic dental card among the dental care professionals from a Baltic country. The study allowed contributions to digitalization research by looking at the phenomenon from industry-level analysis, also revealed the elements that hamper and enable digitalization, outlined the different digitalization patterns, and argued that digitalization relies on the extent by which the new system provides value to the users without interfering with professional expertise and ethics.

This paper aims to analyze the potential future of the 4PL concept based on expert opinions with special regard to the influence of digitalization coming with a disruptive trans-formation of supply chains. Service arrangements, provider capabilities and benefits resulting from a 4PL partnership are compared in current and future configurations. The research follows an explorative mixed methods approach with semi structured interviews followed by an expert panel. This builds a basis for an online survey questionnaire to inquire on important future aspects for the 4PL concept by a sample of respondents from multinational companies. Our results show a clear trend away from simply organizing transportation and logistics activities towards the provision of an IT platform as well as further value-added service activities such as planning, analytics and monitoring. Along with this, IT capabilities appear to be an important differentiator for 4PL providers in the future. Moreover, relationships between 4PL providers and their clients become closer and more strategic, which leads to a customer valuing not only direct cost reductions but rather improvements resulting from optimized operations through superior analysis and planning functions.

With the technical development of digitalization, the converging requirement of telecommunications and mobile communications along with digital broadcasting are increasing. In future, broadcasting services will not only require combining the content, broadcasting, telecommunications industries, but also with the convenient hand-held portable device. Those will become the essential components of integrating digital service. For the one-year period of mobile TV broadcasting pilot plan, the regulatory body who control this policy, NCC, announced that there is no exact schedule for licensing digital TV service through mobile phone, after the pilot plan ended in June 2008. Thus, the development of ¡§Mobile TV¡¨ policy will become difficulty to move on due to the uncertainty of launching date. In this study, the thesis watched the beginning of the plan, and read through the document of related authorities and supervision units. Besides that, it also chose the mobile TV broadcasting pilot teams as interviewees (including Public Television Service team and Dawn TV Technology Corp. team) to reflect the interaction between the policy making and industry compliance. Moreover, it also followed the aftermath of this issue. And adopting the third party point of view, the research took the participatory position without distortion by the passion of stakeholders. Finally, the policy review and inspection was done. For detecting the disadvantageous factors of this mobile TV policy, the research found out that there should focus on three perspectives. One is the ambivalent position of NCC in policy making. Second is the conflict opinion within the Commissioners of NCC on licensing issue. And the third is confrontation between stakeholders and NCC in business forecasting. Other than the worldwide failure of mobile TV business model today, the thesis explored the inner weakness of mobile TV development policy in Taiwan which resulted in a fatal service not causing by itself but political process.

It is the moment for another extraordinary improvement of photography technology. With the great development of digital technology, some characteristics which are the main reason why photography is photography confront challenges. I question this situation and try to trace back the ¡§genie¡¨ of photography. Therefore, this thesis start the discussion of core elements of photography in phenomenology way, and try to realize the most important characteristics that make photography to be photography from these basic elements. Then the discussions expand out to several phenomenon between people and photo apparatus, including contradictions inside the apparatus and different situations of photographers and models. These topics last from the age of traditional photography to digital photography. At last, this thesis try to analyzes the appearance of digital world, and combine these analyses with the photography characteristics which are just discussed above, makes several classification for the works of digital photography. Above all, this thesis realizes that the most important influence of digitalization to photography is ¡§after¡¨ it. That is, most of the changes is happening in the phase of post-production but the process of photoing. Digitalization increase the way of photography, however, it¡¦s not mean that traditional photography is fading away. In addition, photos can be exist in ¡§pixel¡¨ way by digitalization technology. It also riches the usage and quantity of photo images. In this situation, it seems that these two different symbol systems, images and words, are about to meet each other in digital age.

This study investigates how robots employed to conduct the application processfor economic support in some Swedish municipalities impact the social workers’job. Specifically, how duties and time spent shifts, how the interpersonal meetingwith the client is affected, and how their autonomy and independence change as aconsequence of this transformation.A qualitative method with semi-structured interviews has been adopted for thestudy. Four respondents from different places in the country have beeninterviewed. The theory of McDonaldization and previous research in this areamake out a foundation for this study.The results show that the introduction of robots has led to new ways of workingand to redistribution of human recourses within some municipalities. This studycannot prove that robots free up time to work with clients, which was the mainreason for their introduction. Although the interpersonal meeting with the client isstill considered significant, this study shows that it is indeed challenged. Lastlythe study has not observed any strongly pronounced limitations of the autonomyand independence of social workers, but feelings of alienation have beenexpressed.

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Background: Due to the spread of COVID-19, there has been an acceleration in the digitalization which has impacted the working life of many individuals. People have been forced to work remotely and on a daily basis use more advanced digital tools, resulting in an enormous change in the work environment. These major changes in the work environments have affected people working in product and service development firms in various ways. With the main existing literature focusing on the organizational level, a gap in literature was identified on how an accelerated digitalization impacts the individuals working in companies.  Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate how the accelerated digitalization due to COVID-19 has impacted people working in service or product development firms in regard to their innovative and creative working abilities.  Method: A qualitative method with an inductive approach was conducted using semi-structured interviews with ten relevant participants who are working in product or service development firms across Sweden.  Conclusion: The findings suggest that individuals working in product or service developing firms have slightly similar drivers of both innovation and creativity. The analyzation of the findings conveyed that an accelerated digitalization seemed to have a more positive impact on both workers’ attitude towards digitalization and innovative and creative working abilities. Whereas an accelerated digitalization due to COVID-19, was established to have a more negative effect on creativity but not on innovation. Moreover, the findings are synchronized into a framework portraying in detail how the innovative and creative abilities of individuals working in product and/or service developing firms have been impacted by an accelerated digitalization due to COVID-19, and how the key elements has been affected.