Journal of Information Technology (2018) 33, 188–202

ª 2018 Association for Information Technology Trust All rights reserved 0268-3962/18
palgrave-journals.com/jit/

Research Article

Digital innovation and institutional

entrepreneurship: Chief Digital Officer
perspectives of their emerging role
Sanja Tumbas1, Nicholas Berente2, Jan vom Brocke3
1
IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain;
2
Terry College of Business, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA;
3
Institute of Information Systems, University of Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

Correspondence:
S Tumbas, IESE Business School, University of Navarra, Barcelona, Spain.
E-mail: stumbas@iese.edu

Abstract
In this study, we explore the role of Chief Digital Officer (CDO) through the perspectives of
CDOs in thirty-five organizations. In enacting their emerging role, CDOs must navigate the
existing institutionalized context of established information technology (IT) roles and
respective jurisdictional claims. We find that CDOs intentionally draw on the term ‘‘digital’’
to distance themselves from existing executive roles in order to gain legitimacy. CDOs as
institutional entrepreneurs take a focal role in both: (1) articulating and developing the
emerging ‘‘digital’’ logic of action and (2) enacting this digital logic through strategies such
as grafting, bridging, and decoupling to navigate tensions between the existing and
emerging approaches to innovation with digital technologies.
Journal of Information Technology (2018) 33, 188–202. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41265-
018-0055-0; published online 3 May 2018

Keywords: Digital innovation; Chief Digital Officer; Chief Information Officer; Institutional
entrepreneurship; Institutional logic; Logic of action; Organizational tensions; Grafting;
Bridging; Decoupling

Introduction
n recent years, the word ‘‘digital’’ is pervasive in the products (Nambisan et al., 2017; Nylén and Holmström,

I organizational discourse. Organizational scholars and

practitioners are increasingly concerned with digital
innovation (Fichman et al., 2014; Lee and Berente, 2012;
Yoo et al., 2010), digital business strategy (Bharadwaj et al.,
2013; Sawyaradaj et al., 2013), digital transformation (Lucas
et al., 2013), digital platforms and infrastructures (Tilson
et al., 2010; Tiwana et al., 2010), and digital ubiquity (Iansiti
and Lakhani, 2014). This term ‘‘digital,’’ as opposed to the
long-established ‘‘information technology’’ (IT), is used to
signify that something is different (McDonald and Rowsell-
Jones, 2012; Tumbas et al., 2015). Digital innovation is not
only important to technology companies and IT depart-
ments, but is more and more critical to every industry and
every functional unit (Grossman, 2016; Yoo et al., 2010).
Consequently, an increasing diversity of organizational actors
uses digital technologies to drive innovation, often in ways
that go beyond the traditional capabilities of their IT
departments. For example, organizations digitize their
2015), embed software based technologies in physical prod-
ucts (Henfridsson et al., 2014), and analyze ‘‘big data’’ for
customer profiling (Müller et al., 2016; Tambe, 2014).
In response to this trend, some organizations have
introduced a new leadership role – the Chief Digital Officer
(‘‘CDO,’’ Qualtrough, 2016; Rickards et al., 2015). Since the
new role is still emerging, it means different things to
different organizations. As such, the role of CDO receives
quite a bit of attention due to the possible overlaps and
tensions that it may have with existing executive roles
(Dyché, 2015). Although they innovate with digital tech-
nologies, CDOs often do not rely on established norms,
scripts and institutionalized practices of the information
technology (IT) profession (Applegate and Elam, 1992;
Avgerou, 2000). The IT profession, and the associated
executive role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), is
the institutionalized domain that generally holds jurisdiction
over innovation with digital technologies. Conflict over
 Digital innovation and institutional entrepreneurship
legitimate jurisdictional claims is at the heart of professional
formation and survival (Abbott, 1988; Bechky, 2003; Kahl
et al., 2016). Therefore, we pose the following question:
How do CDOs establish a legitimate domain around
innovation with digital technologies in an organizational
context with pre-existing, well-established IT roles and
related jurisdictional claims?
The purpose of this exploratory study is to investigate how
CDOs in different organizations make sense of, legitimize,
and enact this nascent role. To do so, we conduct 35
exploratory interviews with CDOs in a variety of industries.
We sought to understand how they make sense of their roles
in their respective organizations, and how they go about
integrating this role into the pre-existing organizational
context. We find that CDOs act as a form of ‘‘institutional
entrepreneur’’ (Garud et al., 2002) drawing on and
constructing an emerging logic of action (DiMaggio,
1997). Viewing CDOs as institutional entrepreneurs allows
us to unpack the two related aspects of the emergent role:
(1) the development and articulation of its logic of action,
and (2) the identification of approaches to dealing with the
existing institutionalized context. To legitimize their role
and mobilize resources, CDOs contrast their logic of action
with that of existing, institutionalized roles such as the CIO.
They draw this contrast across five dimensions: focus of
control, value orientation, goal achievement, value chain
location, and reference industry. Beyond this conceptual
distinction, CIOs have different approaches to enacting
their role through diverse types of interaction with existing
professions. We refer to these approaches as grafting,
bridging, and decoupling.
As background for our study, we next describe (a) the IT
profession as an institutional field and (b) the CDO role as
institutional entrepreneurs. This is followed by our explora-
tory study and findings. We conclude with a reflection on
institutional entrepreneurship through the perspectives of
CDOs and their relationships with CIOs.
The logic of the IT profession and the digital departure
Professions are institutions in that they have established
ceremonies, rules, certifications, and other material practices
(Friedland and Alford, 1991; Jepperson, 1991; Thornton
et al., 2012). The IT profession is an established institution
(Avgerou, 2000; Brooks et al., 2011), complete with all the
requisite trappings, such as norms, scripts, certifications and
standard operating procedures, that together form the
abstracted body of knowledge necessary for persistence of a
profession (Abbott, 1988). IT professionals have well-estab-
lished practices for dealing with software, for example –
everything from the evaluation and implementation of off-
the-shelf software (ERP, CRM, etc.) to an abundance of
proven techniques for software development (Hardgrave
et al., 2003; Todd et al., 1995). The craft of software
development involves a set of methodologies and notations
(Moore, 1979; Zmud, 1980), requirements elicitation prac-
tices (Karlsson and Hedström, 2013), reusability guidelines
(Banker and Kauffman, 1991; Sojer and Henkel, 2010) and
S Tumbas et al.
189
other established practices. Some methods, such as agile
software development or prototyping, evolved from previous
practices and are now well-accepted (Batra et al., 2010).
Professions apply their abstracted body of knowledge to a
particular domain – what is typically referred to as the
‘‘jurisdiction’’ of the profession (Abbott, 1988). The jurisdic-
tion of the IT profession has historically been innovation
with IT in organizations. The accumulated expertise of the IT
profession has the benefit of decades of professional expe-
rience that guide efforts in systems development, implemen-
tation, and governance (Agarwal and Sambamurthy, 2002;
Guillemette and Pare, 2012). The CIO is the leadership role
that orchestrates these activities (Benjamin et al., 1985;
Peppard et al., 2011). CIOs help organizations to take
advantage of new capabilities in the information age with all
of the changes brought by the Internet (Applegate and Elam,
1992; Ross and Feeny, 1999). In some cases, innovative CIOs
are essential for guiding organizational strategy (Ross and
Feeny, 1999), but in other cases CIOs and their respective IT
functions are removed from strategic decision making in
organization and can be treated as a cost center (Applegate
and Elam, 1992; Benjamin et al., 1985).
Currently, organizations in virtually every industry are
looking to embrace what is referred to as ‘‘digital’’ innovation
(Grossman, 2016; Svahn et al., 2017). Various departments
and professions outside of the IT function are increasingly
involved in innovation with digital technologies, including
marketing (Day, 2011; Royle and Laing, 2014) and human
resource units (Purvis, 2015). Since digital technologies have
historically fallen under the jurisdiction of the CIO, this can
result in institutional contradictions and tensions (Seo and
Creed, 2002). Units that are new to taking such a proactive
role in digital innovation do not necessarily draw upon the
institutionalized principles, values, and approaches of the IT
profession (Tumbas et al., 2015). In some situations, these
groups circumvent the CIO with their innovations, and in
other situations, they enlist the aid of the CIO. In a number
of cases a new executive position has been created – the CDO
– to deal explicitly with digital innovation. As with other
cases of emerging executive roles, this could result in power
struggles as executives make conflicting jurisdictional claims,
as well as institutional contradictions as different executives
refer to their respective professional fields in guiding their
activity (Fligstein, 1990).
Such contestation between emerging and existing executive
roles is not without precedent in the history of corporate
control. For example, Chief Financial Officers (CFOs)
predated Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) in corporate
boardrooms. But CMOs – who had a fundamentally different
view of organizational strategy (Fligstein, 1990) – carved out
a jurisdiction for themselves over a period of time. In
hindsight one that is clearly distinct and legitimate, but this
strategic legitimacy had to be established over time. There
was a period in-between – when organizations were diffusing
the CMO role and it was gaining legitimacy. It was a
‘‘liminal’’ period in the emergence of the new role. Hen-
fridsson and Yoo (2014) describe the liminal phase as
ambiguous because in this time the ‘‘new possible innovation
trajectory is not fully formed but coexists side-by-side with
established trajectories’’ (p. 937).
 Digital innovation and institutional entrepreneurship
190
To describe the transitional period of change where new
executive roles attempt to carve out a jurisdictional space in
an existing, well-established context, we draw on the
institutional entrepreneurship perspective. Institutional
entrepreneurs are leaders who take a central role in episodes
of institution building (Battilana et al., 2009). In doing so,
they depart from the existing templates, or ‘‘logics’’ of
organizing that prevail in the domain (Henfridsson and Yoo,
2014; Seo and Creed, 2002). Because they often break from
existing logics in creating a new domain around digital
innovation, CDOs can be thought of as a form of institu-
tional entrepreneurs.
Institutional entrepreneurs: the liminal time
between emerging and established logics
Executives occupy influential positions in organizations that
grant them abundant access to resources (Battilana, 2006;
Fligstein, 1990), and thus the potential to initiate and actively
participate in transforming existing institutions. Essentially,
they are well positioned to become institutional entrepre-
neurs (Battilana et al., 2009; Hardy and Maguire, 2008) and
execute their vision relying on a variety of strategies
(Henfridsson and Yoo, 2014; Seo and Creed, 2002). They
enact this change by drawing on alternative institutional
logics from those that are dominant in their fields.
Institutional logics can be defined as ‘‘a set of goals, values,
and prescriptions associated with a specific institution’’
(Berente and Yoo, 2012, p. 378). Institutions refer to social
structure that persist over time and are anchored in specific
cultural perspectives and discursive domains (i.e., vocabu-
laries). As indicated above, professions such as the IT
profession are oft-cited examples of institutions (Friedland
and Alford, 1991; Jepperson, 1991; Thornton et al., 2012).
Every institution has a central logic reflected in its material
practices and symbolic constructions, which is available for
organizations and individuals to draw upon (Friedland and
Alford, 1991). Professions, as a form of institutions, there-
fore, have their particular institutional logics (Thornton
et al., 2012, p. 56).
Institutional entrepreneurship is marked by transition – a
liminal phase where multiple logics coexist and new institu-
tional orders can arise from resolution of conflict among
competing logics (Henfridsson and Yoo, 2014). The emerg-
ing logic in the field of practice results in a logic of action
(DiMaggio, 1997) that is not yet institutionalized. Such logics
manifest when parties act in ways without well-established
scripts for behavior and then try to justify or make sense of
these actions with respect to the rationale, or ‘‘models’’
behind certain ends and the means they use to bring them
about (Bacharach et al., 1996, p. 478). Institutional
entrepreneurs bring about change by providing such alter-
native models to mobilize resources to challenge existing
structures (Seo and Creed, 2002). ‘‘Logics of action’’ refer to
the implicit relationship between means and goals that is
assumed by organizational actors and guides their actions.
These logics draw upon ‘‘culturally available schemata –
knowledge structures that represent objects or events and
provide default assumptions about their characteristics,
relationships, and entailments under conditions of incom-
plete information’’ (DiMaggio, 1997, p. 269). According to
this view, culture provides a background of nested schemata
S Tumbas et al.
that interact with situational stimuli in context, to result in
particular actions (DiMaggio, 1997). Distinct parts of
organizations have different cultures (e.g., Marketing and
IT Departments, see Leonardi, 2011) and these cultures
provide a way of viewing and thinking about situations, as
well as guidelines for appropriate actions. Individual or
group identities are central to practices which become a part
of the cultural script (Weber and Dacin, 2011). The more the
individuals identify with certain cultural domains, the more
they will draw upon the cultural resources and logics of
action for those domains.
CDOs develop alternative models of social arrangements.
To do so they need to draw upon existing cultural resources
to mobilize changes (Seo and Creed, 2002; Greenwood and
Suddaby, 2006). The emerging ‘‘digital’’ logics of action are
central to this liminal period for organizations – when the
existing logics coexist with the emerging one (Henfridsson
and Yoo, 2014; Seo and Creed, 2002). We look to identify
how CDOs, as institutional entrepreneurs, navigate this
liminal period in both articulating and enacting their role.
Exploratory study
Research approach
We are interested in how CDOs drive digital innovation
efforts and how they reconcile their new role with existing
institutional arrangements. Therefore, this research is
exploratory and seeks to generate theoretical insights rather
than test theory (Flick, 2009). Our strategy of inquiry
involves interviews with executives (Creswell, 2012) who are
responsible for innovation with digital technologies in
organizations. The goal is to learn how these executives
perceive their role, and how they describe and enact this role
in relation to the existing professionals. Since not every
organization has a separate function driving digital initia-
tives, we sampled only those organizations that explicitly
created such a new organizational arrangement through the
establishment of a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) and an
associated distinct organizational unit (Gerring, 2006). In
this effort, we conducted 35 primary (and 3 follow up)
interviews with CDOs and one with the early founder of a
CDO-related community. The research design emerged as the
research progressed, but overall two key features marked our
research approach: it is empirically grounded and highly
iterative (Seidel and Urquhart, 2013) – subsequent question-
ing emerged from previous interviews and our findings came
from the perspectives of the informants which are rooted in
their lived experiences.
Data collection and analysis
We collected data during June to October 2015 and October
to November 2016. We interviewed CDOs from a variety of
industries (see Table 1 for an overview). Since most indus-
tries are heavily impacted by digital innovations (Grossman,
2016), we sampled for a broad range of industries including
media, financial services, manufacturing, not-for-profit orga-
nizations, and others. In Table 1 the time spent at a CDO
position is listed in reference to the date when the interview
took place. At the time of our interviews, most CDOs were
rather new in this role.
 Digital innovation and institutional entrepreneurship S Tumbas et al.
191

Table1 Data sample

CDO name Industry sector CDO tenure (years)

FinancialServ 1 Banking, finance, and insurance 0.25
FinancialServ 2 Banking, finance, and insurance 0.85
FinancialServ 3 Banking, finance, and insurance 0.85
FinancialServ 4 Banking, finance, and insurance 0.5
FinancialServ 5 Banking, finance, and insurance 2
Manufacturing 1 Manufacturing and engineering 2
Manufacturing 2 Manufacturing and engineering 5.5
Manufacturing 3 Manufacturing and engineering 1.5
Manufacturing 4 Manufacturing and engineering 0.5
Manufacturing 5 Manufacturing and engineering 0.5
ArtRelated 1 Culture 1.5
ArtRelated 2 Culture 4
ArtRelated 3 Film 4
ForCitizens Governmental 0.5
ForAtheletes Association 0.25
ForStudents Leadership education 1
HighEd 1 Education 3
HighEd 2 Education 2
RetailOrg 1 Retail 1
RetailOrg 2 Retail 2
RetailOrg 3 Retail 1
RetailOrg 4 Retail and manufacturing 1
SoftwareCom 1 Software 0.85
SoftwareCom 2 Software 1
MediaPub 1 News publishing 1.25
MediaPub 2 News publishing 1.85
MediaPub 3 Specialized publisher 2
MediaPub 4 Specialized publisher 5.5
MediaPub&TV 5 News publishing and broadcasting 0.5
MediaTV 7 TV broadcasting 3.5
MediaAdvert 8 Advertising 1
MediaAdvert 9 Advertising 2
MediaAdvert 10 Advertising 1
WebTravelAgent Online tourism 0.5
HealthRelated Healthcare 0.85

Interviews centered on three open-ended questions: (1)
Why did the organization create the CDO role? (2) What are
the activities of the CDO office? (3) What are the outcomes
associated with the CDO role? These initially formulated
research questions were tentative and allowed for emergence
of additional relevant topics (Charmaz, 2006; Seidel and
Urquhart, 2013). Our theoretical lens (institutional
entrepreneurship and logics) emerged during the research
to provide the basic vocabulary and an associated set of
assumptions (Klein and Myers, 1999). The analysis of the
interviews occurred iteratively to allow for new insights after
each interview. We were looking for similarities and differ-
ences between each interview (Urquhart, 2013). The two key
themes evolved around characterizing the digital logic and
the process by which organizations enact the role in
organizations. CDOs insisted on having responsibilities that
are different from those assigned to the existing leader
responsible for innovation with digital technologies (usually
the CIO). Also, most organizations had existing IT depart-
ments; thus, we further asked: (4) What is the difference
between ‘‘IT’’ and ‘‘digital’’? (5) How do you delineate your
responsibilities from the existing IT unit? The distinction
between the CDO and the CIO became a core focus for many
of the interviews and was clearly a concern for the
informants.
The two key themes centered around the establishment of
the digital logic and the efforts directed toward carving out
space in the organizations. The findings are presented in two
related sections:
(1) CDO organizations articulate consistent ‘‘logics of
action’’ in defining their professional space. They contrast
their responsibilities to those of the IT professionals
(particularly the CIO). This is one of the most important
dimensions that appeared early in the analysis and
described the meaning CDOs attached to ‘‘digital’’ as
opposed to ‘‘IT.’’ The interviewees used the term ‘‘digital’’
to signal that it is different than ‘‘IT’’ – intentional
distancing what they do from the way their organizations
viewed IT. Certainly the two terms are used differently,
but the goal was to understand how they interpreted that
difference in terms of the experience of organizational
actors (Klein and Myers, 1999) and how they approached
 Digital innovation and institutional entrepreneurship
192
innovation with digital technologies. We describe five
dimensions along which CDOs distinguish their logic of
action.
(2) CDOs encounter the jurisdiction of the existing IT
profession, especially in large established organizations.
Thus, their major task is to navigate the existing
jurisdictional boundaries as they enact their role. We
identified three general approaches to how they recon-
ciled their activity with that of the IT profession. None of
the CDOs in our sample started from a clean slate – in
each case the digital logic was emerging and facing the
predominant way that organizations dealt with IT.
Broadly, the why question allowed us to develop themes
around categories related to ‘‘focus of management control’’
and ‘‘position in value chain.’’ When CDOs described their
primary activities, we learned how they address their goals.
Thus, relevant categories that emerged from the analysis were
‘‘goal achievement’’ and ‘‘reference industry.’’ Finally, by
asking about outcomes we tapped into the concrete results or
planned results. These were reflected in the ‘‘value orienta-
tion’’ category.
Findings
CDO perspectives: ‘‘digital’’ logic of action
CDOs draw on distinct prescriptions for appropriate behav-
ior in innovating with digital technologies. To justify their
professional practices, CDOs often contrast their role to the
existing institutionalized function of IT professional. Accord-
ing to the interviews, the role of ‘‘IT’’ (as opposed to ‘‘digital’’)
is typically said to fall under the jurisdiction of the CIO (or
CTO) and the IT functions in the organization. Respondents
described IT in terms of ‘‘focusing on the fundamentals to
sustainability, ensuring the organization is running effectively,
smoothly, efficiently…IT is helping the business run itself,
looking at data protection, data security (CDO, ForStudents).’’
From the CDO perspective, the IT logic was related to
security, reliability, and standardization and was usually
associated with hardware, software, and networking, and
enterprise information systems (such as ERP and CRM),
which made up a huge portion of many of the organizational
budgets. The IT logic was characterized in terms of process
improvement, streamlining operations and effective, reliable
and secure functioning of the organization.
Even though different organizations enact the CDO role
differently, CDOs distanced themselves from this conception
of IT – pointing out that ‘‘digital’’ is a distinct domain. Many
of the CDOs pointed to a space between IT and Marketing as
their unique jurisdiction: ‘‘one of the interesting things is that
we did have a CMO and we do have a CIO, so really carving
out that territory between the two of them (CDO, ArtRelated
2).’’ Regardless, they all fundamentally distinguished their
role from that of the CIO. We identified five dimensions
along which CDOs distinguished their logic from the CIO:
(1) Focus of management control; (2) Value orientation; (3)
Goal achievement; (4) Reference industry; (5) Position in the
value chain (Table 2).
(1) Focus of management control – one commonality across
all CDOs is that they emphasized, in some form or
another, how they dealt with an uncertain, changing
S Tumbas et al.
domain rather than a well-known or well-understood
domain. CDOs started new projects and coordinated
these initiatives in a strategic manner and communicated
the need for organizations to be open to and incorporate
open-ended innovation:
‘‘We need to create a clear, unambiguous digital strategy that
supports the digital growth agenda that everybody in the
organization can understand…I believe everything has to drive
value and every single, even down to a release, every single
released code I will do, whether original website or a piece of
software, we have to measure the values they create and hold
people accountable on it (CDO, Manufacturing 4).’’
Even though the focus on setting up new projects predom-
inated the interviews, CDOs made it a part of their mission to
develop connecting links between ongoing projects and new
digital initiatives. As described by the CDO of RetailOrg 1,
her goal was to establish a center which leads strategy:
‘‘[The CEO] didn’t even know what was the title that he
wanted, but he knew he had a problem with developing a
digital strategy for his organization. He had tried, but it
wasn’t successful, and he needed somebody at the group
executive committee level to build a strategy for the group
and work with everybody in the organization to do this
(CDO, RetailOrg 1).’’
Every CDO that we interviewed emphasized the strategic
relevance of their activity. They often contrasted this with
operationally focused IT departments. CDOs indicated that
the IT logic involved operational integration – often associ-
ated with the classic tasks of the IT professional around
system implementation and support. They characterized CIO
behavior as structured by established patterns of activity,
well-established through norms of the IT profession. One of
these norms involves the responsibilities of the IT profes-
sional in the organization, which is focused on optimization
of the ongoing business tasks and integration of systems.
CDOs pointed out that there was typically a well-established
way of designing, implementing and monitoring these
initiatives, which accounted for this difference in focus for
CIOs and the IT function:
‘‘I see information technology largely as an infrastructure
topic because you always have your IT teams and your IT
groups that are very focused on the infrastructure to facilitate
the technology (CDO, HealthRelated).’’
(2) Value orientation – it describes where the essential
contribution of the CDO’s team lies. According to CDOs,
their organizations primarily focused on new revenue
streams – increasing the ‘‘top line’’ performance of a
company. This was their primary function in the
organization and the vocabulary that they adopted
accordingly was one of business models:
‘‘How much are they challenging our business model, our
revenue models, our go to market? I think these are most of
the discussions I am having at the moment. That’s why I also
think that the scope of digital transformation overall and
 Digital innovation and institutional entrepreneurship
Table2 CDO’s perspective: five dimensions characterizing the ‘‘digital’’ logic of action
Dimension Definition
Focus of Key concerns and structures that direct the execution Initiating new projects triggered by and rooted in
management of values and beliefs
control
Value Core outcomes and standards that guide the
orientation accomplishment of goals
Goal The means to accomplish goals by adopting certain The basic working modes include heavy
achievement approaches and techniques
Reference field The field of practice in which the logic is rooted
Location in Assumptions about the appropriate function and role The location in the value chain is following the
value chain of an organization with respect to the functions and
roles of partnering organizations
then also my role is much more on the business side than on
the IT side (CDO, FinancialServ 4).’’
Value orientation is tightly linked to role centrality which
triggers organizational actors to evoke a certain schema when
taking responsibility in their roles. For example, CDOs often
started projects thinking in terms of their direct impact –
using available data to justify their assumptions and further
motivate the strategic relevance of the project:
‘‘I report to the public affairs person and to the head of
development because I also thought it was very important
when I took the CDO role to have a foothold in the revenue
generating arm for the University (CDO, HighEd 1).’’
While CDOs identified with the strong emphasis on
increasing revenues, they described CIOs as traditionally
more focused on internal systems and technology – focused
on the efficient streamlining of business processes. The CDO
S Tumbas et al.
193
Key findings
digital technologies is the primary goal in the
‘‘digital’’ frame. New initiatives are the core concern
of the CDO and the projects span various
departments and areas of the organization.
Accompanying the focus on newness, there is a
balancing act and it is necessary to sync with
existing IT projects
Generating revenue streams through the deployment
of digital technologies is the source of immediate
and sustained goal. Each strategic step needs to
contribute and be aligned with the overall goal to
generate revenue. The CDO aims at displaying the
value of digital technologies as a platform for
revenue streams in different departments in the
organization
experimentation with digital content, service or
device layers of digital technologies. The projects
are smaller scale, short iteration cycles. Also, the
digital script suggests that the organizations rely on
existing digital platforms and equally regards own
and externally controlled digital resources
The start-up field is closely related to a domain that is
supportive of newness, latest technological
developments, lean and fast scaling. However, in
some cases the organization is mature and needs to
develop solid foundations for collaborating with
start-ups instead of imitating their working mode
principle of being close to the customer and
developing a direct digitally supported relation
with the customer. Customer facing also implies a
mindset adopting the ‘‘outside-in’’ perspective on
the organization
of a large retail chain firm explained how the IT department
is organized to reduce costs and keep them low, and in many
organizations the IT organization is treated as a cost center:
‘‘You have to understand the entire idea of bringing products
to market, deliveries, supply chains, customer service, mar-
keting, sales, customer onboarding, all that kinds of stuff.
CIO doesn’t really have that horizontal view, right? The CIO
is really set up to manage information systems and keep
everything running (CDO, RetailOrg 1).’’
(3) Goal achievement – CDOs indicated that the process
through which they achieved their innovative goals
involved experimentation as a central feature. Experi-
mentation aimed to break down tasks in smaller units
and run pilot projects and test those pilots, learn from
them, and iterate before committing to a major roll out.
The CDO of a media organization described this
experimental mode of goal achievement:
 Digital innovation and institutional entrepreneurship
194
‘‘In addition, what I’ve done here that is really cool is that as
we have a lot of new technology… The learning process on
this new era is endless. So what I have done also in our lab is
everything that is new, we have there… the whole team gets
in there. They explain how it works and try to create solutions
for our clients who use the new technology. So instead of
saying, ‘‘Well there is a google glass that I don’t know how to
use,’’ we get it there and we say, ‘‘Use it. Try to imagine how
we can make it… understand how it works, and create
solutions based on the experience (CDO, MediaAdvert 10).’’
Applications developed through this approach often run as
beta versions for extended periods of time with the expec-
tation that elements of the application (such as interfaces)
will change frequently. A manufacturing CDO points out
how they needed to create open-ended applications struc-
tured in a way that tolerates risk using the example of social
media applications:
‘‘Social media is a very tricky one because they have their own
language, their own platforms […] they’re also extremely
sensitive from a corporate communication standpoint because
things can go very wrong. From that thing we made sure that
we build a system that essentially gave us more freedom and
freedom to experiment in those areas that are less dangerous.
We are isolated and I told my counterpart from a
communication standpoint that it’s not that everything is
at the same level of risk (CDO, Manufacturing 3).’’
One of the CDOs described this working mode as ‘‘running
beta version’’:
‘‘I take almost everything as a beta, let’s get up and running
within three months. Only through that process do you
determine what works and what doesn’t (CDO, HighEd 2).’’
Often professional experiences of CDOs had their roots in
start-ups or highly dynamic environments:
‘‘It’s mainly empowering people. Making them feel like they can
do new things. That’s exciting for the museum. Giving them
permission to try things. To fail. To do more things. Those are
all things that require a lot of effort (CDO, ArtRelated 1).’’
The respondents characterized CIOs, on the other hand, in
terms of operational integration that is more risk-averse and
less entrepreneurial than CDOs.
‘‘Again, if I want to compete with the external entrepreneur-
ial startup incubator ecosystem, I’ve got to be playing by the
same set of rules. One of those rules is how do I optimize my
supply chain to be using the latest and greatest version of the
innovation […] However the integration is a part of the
CIOs responsibility (CDO, SoftwareCom 1).’’
(4) The reference field – to guide their logics of action, CDOs
relate to the field of technology start-ups and digital giants
such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook. CDOs universally
took these organizations as a reference point, and they
strongly identified with them, their activities were guided
by principles, such as fast execution, digital in the heart of
S Tumbas et al.
the strategy, scaling initiatives iteratively, avoiding much
bureaucracy. The CDO wanted to ‘‘go down to New York
City and Silicon Valley and bring back the best technology
that [can be found] to help advance our digital. We were one
of the first to use Heart Beat, which is real time monitoring
(CDO, HighEd 1).’’ Another CDO, in a media company,
described their working mode by comparing it to start-ups:
‘‘We are trying to discover every day, what is it that has to be
done. So imagine the start-ups. The way they work is they
understand that what the consumers or the people need, and
when they see this, they see an opportunity and they develop
something to fulfill this need. That’s exactly what we do
(CDO, MediaAdvert 10).’’
In established organizations, this start-up mentality can
manifest through relationships with start-ups. For example,
the CDO of a healthcare organization highlighted that their
goal is not to join the ‘‘Googles and Watsons of the world’’,
because that is not their key competence, but rather, to
partner with them. Such CDOs were more selective about
developing internal digital capabilities and instead build
relationships with appropriate external providers:
‘‘The reason is if we’re going to bring those advanced
analytics and digital capabilities in house, it would be very
difficult to stay competitive. Whereas if we’re partnering with
the Googles of this world or the Watson IBMs of this world,
they have to be the best because otherwise they’ll lose their
customers. Our strategy is […] to really partner with the best
people in smart ways. That will be our approach to
capabilities (CDO, HealthRelated).’’
In stark contrast to this start-up mentality, CDOs typically
characterized their IT unit as core to ongoing operations. As
such, IT units needed to focus on a rigorous process of
systematic evaluation and methodological implementation to
ensure strong implementation outcomes. This typically
required longer planning horizons:
‘‘The traditional IT organization in our structure was
absolutely not able to take some projects and deliver in a
very fast-pace, with some small budget, on-time and agile
and do it and redo it and so on… the entire structure is
totally opposed to being agile (CDO, Manufacturing 2).’’
(5) Position in the value chain – according to CDOs, digital
was about customer-facing processes and set emphasis on
the end customer as both the receiver of digital services
or products and the source for further insights. It was
crucial to become the first contact point and platform
between relevant customers and business partners:
‘‘Compared to the previous business model - there is a very
different approach to accessibility of our programs…if you’re
a university student or a company, you would have to sign up
with our organization and pay before you saw any types of
opportunities or talent. The difference now is - it is very much
like a social network. You can almost compare to LinkedIn
where all of our opportunities and all of our people are now
 Digital innovation and institutional entrepreneurship
openly available to see for anyone, anywhere. Instead of
paying before you see opportunities, and the value part is you
would see this right away (CDO, ForStudents).’’
Even when CDOs led internal initiatives, they translated their
goals to reflect the ‘‘outside-in view’’ of the organization. For
example, when organizing digital competencies in the
organization, teams were assembled in a way to generate
immediate impact for external customers. There was less fear
attached to the exposure of the organization on digital
platforms, not backing off from directly reaching out to the
customer through digital channels, etc. The goal is to ‘‘get
something into the hands of consumers as early as possible and
start learning [together with the customer] (CDO, MediaPub
2).’’ Here, CDOs often used examples to describe how their
responsibility differed from that of an IT department.
Especially describing an image where IT was the back office,
while digital worried more about the front end:
‘‘If you’re like most financial service companies the number
one impediment to being able to execute in digital would be
that your core systems, your operating systems, your process-
ing systems, your financial systems don’t play well with the
web. They’re not API enabled. You can’t build digital front
ends that communicate easily with them, right? I think a lot
of larger companies they build these digital front ends and
they fake it in the back end (CDO, FinancialServ 3).’’
CDOs depict the IT unit in terms of the back-end – far from
the customer: ‘‘[the CIO is] generally focus[ing] on internal
technology. The robustness of our email systems, our data
storage, etc (CDO, Manufacturing 1).’’ In addition, the CDO
of another manufacturing organization described the com-
plexity of the IT mission:
‘‘IT is running all the hosting activities, because they run the
whole thing for the whole services, all the cloud services,
internal services, accounting … they also run hosting for our
sites (CDO, Manufacturing 3).’’
In sum both digital and IT areas of an organization look to
innovate with digital technologies, but do so according to
much different logics. It is not always clear which unit has
jurisdiction and in what way over a particular initiative, nor
is it clear how historical decisions around architecture,
infrastructure, and technology roadmaps play out in the
enactment of the CDO role.
CDO approaches to navigating tensions
CDOs reported a variety of approaches for navigating the
tensions with existing departments that arise when the digital
logic of action is confronted with other logics in the
organizations. The IT function is particularly important,
since both the digital and IT functions essentially serve to
drive innovation with digital technologies in the organiza-
tion, so the jurisdiction of each unit and the logics they bring
to bear on the approach to innovation can blur. We
characterize three general approaches that CDOs we inter-
viewed describe to mobilize resources and create a space
for their emergent role in contexts of opposing logics:
(1) grafting, (2) bridging, and (3) decoupling (see Table 3).
S Tumbas et al.
195
(1) Grafting enables organizations to embark on new digital
projects by aligning those projects closely to existing
organizational functions. In a sense, this involves aligning
and incorporating the two units to work together in a
way that accommodates the institutional logic of existing
units with the emerging digital logic of action of the
CDO. For example, the CDO of MediaPub 2 describes
how the digital department is organized with a cost
reduction focus to avoid competition with the other
departments for the budget and establish transparent
distribution of responsibility:
‘‘We are organized as a cost center and this is one of the
very important things. In this business, if I would have
been a profit center or managing a profit center with
digital activities, then I think from the core business I
would be seen as a competitor. There would be no
incentive for them to change the core business […]
because then their logic would be: ‘‘Now digital, it’s with
the CDO, so I don’t have to do anything with digital
because it’s his job. If he fails, it’s not my problem (CDO,
MediaPub 2).’’
The main idea is that the other departments ‘‘pull’’ the
services from the digital department – the CDO group
supports them. This may seem very similar to the usually
depicted role of the IT department. However, the team is
infusing the ‘‘digital’’ logic to many areas of the organization
through temporarily tightly coupled activities of the digital
team with other teams in the organization. The CDO applies
‘‘digital’’ methodological frames while working with many
diverse functions such as the IT department, editorial teams
as well as the management board. These new activities
involve agility, multidisciplinary teams, digital content cre-
ation and others. Gradually, the core activity in the editorial
teams has also changed significantly. The creation of editorial
content is accompanied with principles for reusing data and
also using a diversity of tools to report the stories in an
interactive fashion:
‘‘Then there’s the editorial teams, of course, that I also work
with, and I try to hand them all kinds of tools that they can use
to actually change the way that they do reporting. I help them to
point out tools where they can build an interactive story fast
and easily, help them to work with data journalism, if I see a
data set that has become available that’s something that they
can leverage to build a new story (CDO, MediaPub 2).’’
This tight linkage goes in both directions – not only does the
digital organization accommodate elements of the existing
functions, but it also works to incorporate its practices within
those functions. Often this process is accompanied with
hiring new employees that have certain digital competencies.
For example, the CDO of a bank described the new
requirements that where more aligned with the ‘‘digital’’
logic:
‘‘In the operations group or what’s now the customer
experience group, we’re changing the way we recruit, we’re
changing what we expect of people, and we’re changing the
overall skill mix of that group (CDO, FinancialServ 3).’’
 Digital innovation and institutional entrepreneurship S Tumbas et al.
196

Table3 Three approaches for navigating tensions in ‘ digital’’ versus ‘‘IT’’ logics of action

Definition Outcomes Drawbacks

Grafting
Grafting enables the digital initiative by
tightly linking these new practices and
capabilities with an existing functional
unit
Bridging
Bridging involves establishing links
between existing functional units to
achieve a new digital initiative
Decoupling
Decoupling describes how new digital
initiatives are separated and insulated
from the existing functional units to
achieve a new digital initiative
New digital practices in several
departments, teams with mixed
competencies acting toward a
common goal
Triggers restructuring of existing
executive roles and thereby a new
collaborative working mode,
overcomes silos
Fast execution of the digital logic, easy Lacking integration with existing
identification of members with the
goals
Cost intensive, time consuming, the
‘‘digital’’ unit acts against its core
identity – create new value streams,
direct impact, experimentation
Initial power struggles, temporally limited
structures, no sufficient consideration
of existing IT governance policies,
culture of ‘‘lone warriors’’

This can result in a blend between existing and new principles
reflected in smaller teams, mixed competencies:
‘‘We create a team to work on those projects, so we call those
squads in the same way that Spotify uses that term. What we
do is we create that central team of skills from the
organization (CDO, ForCitizens).’’
Grafting requires a long-term vision that can result in
fundamentally different modes of work, as organizations
reconcile multiple logics of action. For example, the CDO of
a media and newspaper company mentioned that the pace of
work is no longer ‘‘to the hour’’ as in traditional print news.
Content is produced for various channels and the organiza-
tion needs to approach this strategically:
Basically, you are publishing news all day, so you don’t have
this process where you are working toward one time of the
day where everything needs to be ready. That’s weird, and
people have to get used to that, and you need to start thinking
about what you are going to break on your website and what
you want to have in your newspaper (CDO, MediaPub 2).
Despite the benefits of laying a solid ground for more long-term
success in transforming the organization to incorporate more
digital practices, some CDOs also describe how a typical ‘‘digital
person’’ perceives this pace as rather slow and traditional:
Exactly. To me, it’s always slow, because I’m a digital person
and it’s always too slow. (laughs). But at the end of the day
there’s no discussion on the need, but they [the other
departments] don’t feel it as urgent as I think it should be on
a day-to-day basis (CDO, RetailOrg 1).
Grafting is but one way that CDOs enact their role with
respect to existing organizational functions.
(2) Bridging involves tactics to span two or more existing
functions. In contrast to grafting, bridging involves
reconciling logics in a way that does not blend or merge
those logics, but instead focuses on linking distinct
organizational units, yet maintaining that distinction in
the respective domains. In cases of bridging, it is often
the CDO function itself that acts as a boundary spanner
between two other domains – such as between the CIO
(or CTO) and CMO. For example, the CDO of ArtRe-
lated 2 explains how there is no solid line between the
activities of these executives and how they need to work
together:
… chief digital officer is kind of that bridge between the two
[i.e. IT and Marketing], and if they start working well
together, then your role goes away because both of those
people are highly digitally capable, but they don’t need the
intermediary anymore (CDO, ArtRelated 2).
During bridging the CDOs act as a lynch pin. This is how the
CDO of an educational organization explains the role as
linking the core process and the IT department. In this case,
the core process is related to communication and the IT
department takes care of the infrastructure:
I’m really a lynch pin between the two. There’s someone whose
job it is to do public affairs and communications […] also
inbound communication. We are in the media every minute of
the day. If seventeen similar organizations could be questioned
about issue X, our organization will lead the story in the New
York Times. So, one department is focus is much more media
relations and inbound. […] while IT, their focus is very much
on infrastructure and security (CDO, HighEd 2).
Another CDO of a media company describes a similar
situation in which the established relation with existing chief
roles is crucial:
That’s pretty much my responsibility. I have a commercial
responsibility and an editorial responsibility, but the jour-
nalists are reporting to the Editor in Chief and the sales reps
are reporting into the Chief Commercial Officer. I have a
small staff who’s running the websites and doing digital
 Digital innovation and institutional entrepreneurship
projects, but I’m very much relying on other chief roles’ people
(CDO, MediaPub 1).
In a temporal sense, once digital practices are enacted by the
other departments, the need for the CDO role may vanish, as
this was emphasized in a number of interviews:
‘‘I see myself as a transitional figure that maybe the term
Chief Digital Officer doesn’t exist in ten years when
everybody has become digital, but, right now, the role is to
push things forward and make sure that our knowledge of the
latest things happening within digital are internalized within
our company. The journalists, they work full-time producing
content, sales reps work full-time selling ad words and ads.
There’s really nobody who’s having the look on our future
business models. That’s the role I have now (CDO,
MediaPub 1).’’
However, as was also emphasized during many interviews,
the bridging role emerges because it is difficult to change
what existing units have historically done. In some organi-
zations this is deemed ‘‘impossible’’:
‘‘The best you can do is to say, all right let’s talk marketing or
let’s talk communication or let’s talk strategy. What is the
digital aspect of your profession? An idea that you transform
everyone and make them understand what Twitter is about is
just silly. It’s not silly. It would be great but it’s just
impossible (CDO, Manufacturing 5).’’
Thus, some bridging CDOs think of themselves as
translators:
‘‘There are some people now saying, and they might be right,
that you’ll never be able to get rid of the bridge between IT
and the business because you always need a translator.
Maybe digital will always be that translator because IT guys
speak a certain language, and marketing guys speak a certain
language, and when you put them in the same room they
really don’t understand each other. They really don’t. You
might always need these digital people in the middle to do
that translation and to be that interface. I really don’t know
how it will turn out, we’ll have to see, but there’s definitely
those 2 paths ahead (CDO, HealthRelated).’’
Some of the CDOs, however, described neither bridging nor
grafting practices in enacting their roles.
(3) Decoupling refers to buffering or isolating digital initia-
tives from other existing practices. This mechanism may
allow CDOs to establish a ‘‘second speed’’ IT function by
keeping the emerging logic separate from the existing
ideas about the IT organization. Often it was due to the
nature of traditional industries where the IT function was
especially slow and supportive of the core business:
‘‘Because traditional IT organization in our structure was
absolutely not able to take some projects and deliver in a very
fast-pace, with some small budget, on-time and agile and do
it and redo it and so on (CDO, Manufacturing 2).’’
S Tumbas et al.
197
This approach requires less integration in the beginning to
enable a strategic view for digital initiatives quickly. The new
digital organization functions like an island of start-up
activity in the mist of the existing IT organization. Organi-
zations where decoupling was the predominant approach
showed some evidence of deeply entrenched oppositional
logics. For example, the CDO of FinancialServ 2 described
how decoupling removes the tension between the established
and the new function:
‘‘On the IT side, I think, you can take two routes. One is you
try and transform legacy, so all the legacy, IT and
infrastructure, you try and transform it. I mean, that’s
really, really hard, and most companies fail if they try to do
that because it takes so long, and it is so enterprise level. Or
you can set up a build, a separate, twin, parallel IT structure,
and you just leave the legacy to be, you ignore it. You simply
build something separate anew as if you were a start-up, just
build a completely parallel, new infrastructure. By doing that,
you remove a lot of the tension between digital and IT and
the need to transform the technology and the ways of working
that exist in IT (CDO, FinancialServ 2).’’
This approach aims at speeding up the innovation lifecycle
because the CDO does not have to face restrictions that are
inherently a part of traditional established organizations. The
digital function became an alternative to the IT function for
rapid-development projects:
‘‘The first six months, I was to structure the web, add a new
portal, destroy some sites, adding something more organized,
branded and so on. Right after, it came quite obvious that a
lot of demand came to my office for different things. Of
course, social media, media monitoring, digital marketing,
any type of application that the typical IT could not be able to
provide. The business unit find quite rapidly that they have a
lot more services going through my service instead of going to
traditional IT (CDO, Manufacturing 2).’’
However, after reaching some key milestones, merging the
new and the old becomes a relevant question:
‘‘From a product perspective, we have driven and launched
two new mobile apps. We’ve launched […] the most
disruptive play against banking […] went straight to the
top of the app stores in [European country]. We’ve launched
them this week, it was launched on Android this week – the
money app, which is another mobile money app we invented
[…] There’s a lot of different stuff that we have done and
now we’re really thinking about how we put a digital
transformation into the rest of the organization (CDO,
FinancialServ 2).’’
CDOs who chose to decouple their units initially also needed
to recruit relevant digital capabilities. Members of the newly
established decoupled digital unit can easily identify with the
start-up mode of working and pace of innovation. However,
this approach often creates the identity of ‘‘lone warriors’’
which may prove to be difficult to sustain on a longer term,
particularly as digital capabilities need to be infused into
other organizational units.
 Digital innovation and institutional entrepreneurship
198
Discussion
The CDO is an emerging role that is still in formation
(Haffke et al., 2016; Rickards et al., 2015). It does not
represent an institutionalized profession in organizations –
whereas other executive roles do (Fligstein, 1990). As such,
CDOs need to both carve a space for their units, and enact
their roles in relation to other executive roles and their
respective jurisdictions. Thus, the emergence of this role
offers an opportunity to understand how this happens, and,
in turn, gain insight to institutional entrepreneurship within
organizations (Hardy and Maguire, 2008).
Overall, these findings lead us to propose two intrinsically
related sides of the emergent CDO role. First is the
development and articulation of its inherent logic of action.
CDOs need to gain legitimacy and demark their jurisdiction
in a way that contrasts their activity with related functions.
Since the CIO and the associated IT function is the
incumbent role in most organizations for innovating with
digital technologies, CDOs focus much of their identification
in terms that contrast their role with the already established
CIO role. This characterization, in turn, provides the
reference for action – the ‘‘logic’’ of action – for the
enactment of this role. Second, CDOs take a variety of
approaches in enacting this logic with respect to the other
roles, and we describe three processes through which this
happens (i.e., grafting, bridging, and decoupling). Next, we
will briefly discuss each of these contributions, followed by a
reflection on digital technologies and institutional
entrepreneurship in organizations.
The digital logic of action
CDOs justify their ‘‘digital’’ logic by contrasting it to what the
‘‘IT’’ logic represents from their perspective. This is a
jurisdictional move in the sense that by both constructing a
specific logic for the IT field and proposing an alternative,
CDOs can carve out a space for their own roles. If the IT
function is slow, risk-averse, and operational, then this
function is clearly not suited to the fast-pace, experimental,
and customer-facing imperatives commonly associated with
digital innovation (Bharadwaj et al., 2013; Tanriverdi et al.,
2010). Of course, this characterization would be totally unfair
in organizations with innovative and ambidextrous IT
functions, where CIOs can reconcile highly-reliable opera-
tions with experimental innovation with digital technologies
(e.g., vom Brocke, 2016). The point of this distinction,
however, is not to generalize across all CIOs and IT
functions, but to clarify how the CDOs position themselves
in relation to CIOs and IT units, supporting the legitimiza-
tion of their role. In these situations, it is important for the
CDOs to claim the ‘‘digital’’ mantle, and to relegate the CIO –
whether fairly or not – to the IT logic that they construct in
Table4 CDO’s characterization of ‘‘IT’’ versus ‘‘digital’’ logics
Dimension IT logic
Focus of management control Operational integration
Value orientation Cost saving
Goal achievement Risk aversion
Reference industry Industrial organization
Location in value chain Operations
S Tumbas et al.
opposition to the requirements of the new demands of digital
innovation. Table 4 summarizes this distinction as articu-
lated by the CDOs we interviewed.
In explicating the digital logic of action that CDOs draw
upon, we contribute to research and practice around digital
innovation and IT governance more generally by offering a
way to make sense of different imperatives that drive
innovation with digital technologies.
Nowadays, requests for digitalization are coming from
different functional units (Economist, 2013). Organizations
that emphasize reliable, secure operations will be fundamen-
tally different from those that focus on experimentation,
novelty, and speed. The culture, norms, and prescriptions for
appropriate action will be different. This does not mean that
the same executive cannot manage both approaches (there is
some evidence that they can, e.g., vom Brocke, 2016), but
that these imperatives require different practices.
By articulating these logics, we equip researchers with a
way to make sense of diverse imperatives associated with
digital innovation. On the one hand, there is the institutional
logic of the IT profession; on the other hand, there is the
emerging digital logic of action. The IT profession represents
an institutional context rooted in the industrial age opera-
tions (King, 2011). The institutional logic of this field
provides abundant prescriptions for the development, imple-
mentation, and maintenance of information systems in
organizations (Avgerou, 2000). As an institutionalized field
it can be incredibly resistant to change. Organizations that
implement the CDO role are specifically embracing change
outside the institutionalized field of IT. This is particularly
relevant in those organizations where the IT function is
considered to be a cost center and does fulfill a strategic role
(Weill and Woerner, 2016). An appreciation of the IT
institutional logic as characterized by the CDOs that we
interviewed provide one reason for why the unit is relegated
to a cost center service organization without a strategic role.
This shows how some organizations (those that implement a
CDO) see their IT function. Since their perceptions are likely
not entirely disassociated from reality, it also highlights how
the IT function can become institutionalized in an organi-
zation into an infrastructural role.
Further, articulation of the emerging digital logic of action
provides cultural resources (DiMaggio, 1997) that are
important to understanding and identifying with digital
innovation. The discourse within an organization – the way
people in an organization make sense of and frame digital
phenomena – is constitutive of the way the organization
operates (Berente and Yoo, 2012; Phillips et al., 2004). Thus,
CDOs enacting the digital logic of action act as a sort of
institutional entrepreneur in the organization – carving a
path outside the institutionalized practices of the incumbent
Digital logic
New initiatives
Revenue enhancing
Heavy experimentation
IT industry, digital disruptors and start-ups
Customer facing
 Digital innovation and institutional entrepreneurship
IT function. Key implications for practice involve under-
standing the role of cultural resources in organizations – how
logics are present and how they can shape innovation with
digital technologies by considering the distinct logics that
drive professional arrangements and roles. Therefore, it is
becoming crucial to recognize different logics that come into
play as digital innovation is ubiquitous and to manage the
situation and the divergent logics and associated practices
appropriately. We are not suggesting that a new executive
role is inevitable. Instead, we are proposing that organiza-
tions need to enact digital practices, and do so by considering
basic cultural elements, mindsets and rituals that characterize
professional backgrounds involved in the process.
For those organizations that do implement a CDO role in
order to address conflicting imperatives, it is important to
note that different CDOs can enact their logics much
differently. This leads to our second major contribution:
the identification of different practices CDOs take within
organizations to enact the digital logic.
Enacting the digital logic of action
CDOs act as institutional entrepreneurs, as such they shift
organizational narratives (Henfridsson and Yoo, 2014). In
doing so, they carve a space for themselves, but still need to
act in the context of existing, established functional groups.
Our second key contribution involves describing three
processes through which CDOs navigate institutionalized
contexts with established logics and jurisdictional claims
(grafting, bridging, and decoupling).
Grafting enables institutional entrepreneurs to leverage the
legitimacy and institutionalized practices of existing func-
tional units dealing with digital innovation. Much the way
grafting of technologies involves the way specific, locally
oriented systems extend shared infrastructures (Sanner et al.,
2014); this form of grafting leverages the organizational
infrastructure that existing professions provide. Though in a
different context, ‘‘installed base’’ of an infrastructure is often
a source of inertia (Star and Ruhleder, 1996), and in a similar
way, the institutionalized logic of the IT profession in
organization has established patterns of appropriate
behavior.
The grafting approach, which leverages and tightly
connects to an existing function, is particularly valuable
when the existing IT domain in the organization is rather
homogenous and the power is unified (Battilana et al., 2009).
These CDOs encounter IT units that have established a
dominant role in governing most digital initiatives and are
deeply embedded in organizations. By grafting their organi-
zation onto the existing, powerful, IT organization, the CDO
can leverage this collaboration to become legitimate. Of
course, this also means that the CDO risks taking a
subservient role to the IT function and may be relegated to
jurisdiction over what the IT function chooses not to pursue.
Much of the existing research on professional jurisdictions
in organizations emphasizes the contestation – the way
different professions jockey for authority in particular
domains. For example, in his seminal work, Abbott (1988)
points to the battle between accounting and legal professions
for jurisdiction over taxes – a conflict that the accounting
profession won. Recently, however, it has become clear that it
is not always a battle. Emerging occupations can work to
S Tumbas et al.
199
connect and collaborate with existing professions, and
through this integrative effort can thus legitimize the
emerging occupation (Kahl et al., 2016). This existing
research, however, plays out on the societal level – very little
of the work on professionalization looks at the way such
dynamics play out within organizations (Bechky, 2003). By
identifying this grafting process, we not only contribute to
one approach that organizations can take to legitimize the
digital innovation function, we also provide an example of an
integrative approach to new occupation formation within
organizational bounds.
Bridging is another approach CDOs take to integration
during the formation of this new occupation – an approach
that has different implications for how the C-suite works
together. The bridging approach requires boundary spanning
between the practices of the institutional entrepreneur and
the existing functions in an organization. Levina and Vaast
(2005) describe such bridging in terms of ‘‘the emergence of a
new joint field which unites agents in their pursuit of a
common organizational interests while, at the same time,
distinguishing them from others who are not engaged in a
similar pursuit’’ (p. 337). Consequently, beyond departmen-
tal affiliations, the institutional entrepreneur creates a shared
field for boundary spanning. It is not grafting on one or the
other function – but a separate collaborative function that
gets its legitimacy specifically from integrating the two. In the
case of the CDOs, we interviewed; this bridge is often
between IT and Marketing functions. It is specifically through
the integration of these two functions that the CDO claims its
jurisdiction.
Existing functions exert both formal and informal influ-
ence as they jockey for position (Fligstein, 1997) and may
prefer to see a new boundary spanning field rather than
relinquish jurisdiction to the other established field. Com-
pared to grafting, which involves aligning with one powerful
functional group and thus potentially strengthens the juris-
dictional claims of that group, bridging does less to change
the existing order. By not aligning with one group or the
other, bridging does more to maintain the existing division of
labor, while at the same time clearly demarking a unique
jurisdictional claim. Bridging requires varying degrees of
translation between professional groups (Czarniawska-Jo-
erges and Sevón, 1996; Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003) with
less of a long-term-oriented objective compared to grafting.
However, both bridging and grafting are integrative
approaches.
Decoupling, on the other hand, is in many ways more akin
to traditional views of occupational formation (Abbott,
1988). Decoupling isolates the CDO’s organization from
outside scrutiny, thus allowing it to form on its own terms.
This is a tactic similar to ‘‘skunk works’’ projects in
organizations. Skunk works involve new projects that form
outside of the normal organizational structure and thus avoid
scrutiny and the associated political dynamics, as well as the
need to comply with technical standards such as architecture
(Goodhue et al., 2009). From an institutional standpoint,
decoupling has long been understood as a strategy to shield
activity from outside scrutiny, and thus maintain activity that
might not survive that scrutiny (Pache and Santos, 2012).
The conflicting requirements of opposing logics are seg-
mented off, allowing different units to pursue their own,
often contradictory, pursuits (Berente and Yoo, 2012; Meyer
 Digital innovation and institutional entrepreneurship
200
and Rowan, 1977). Decoupling approaches enable greater
independence and flexibility for CDOs, but do so at the
expense of tight integration with the rest of the organization
and challenges to the scaling of innovations. Therefore, the
decoupling approach to CDO enactment may be the most
difficult to sustain over time. Without the additional
legitimacy from integrating with other established units,
decoupled digital innovation groups run the risk of being
absorbed or eliminated. They have to battle with functional
units that are far stronger and well-established and so their
jurisdictional claims can be quite tenuous if a more powerful
function wishes to claim the same space. Of the three
approaches, it is perhaps decoupling that is most conducive
to temporary organizational form that will one day vanish.
When the organization decides to maintain a separate unit in
this way, it may essentially act as an incubator for digital
innovation that exists by the consent of the established
functions of the organization.
Regardless of the approach to enactment of their role, all
CDOs seek to gain legitimacy from other professionals and
navigate the resulting tensions that may arise as those
meanings systems give rise to the institutional change process
(Battilana et al., 2009; Seo and Creed, 2002).
Concluding remarks
In this study, we reported on how CDOs describe and
distinguish their ‘‘digital’’ logic of action and the different
approaches they take to enact this logic in organizations.
Thus, we do not elaborate on how, in absence of this role, the
CIO and other areas of an organization would deal with
digital initiatives. Therefore, we acknowledge that there are
organizations with IT departments that play a major role in
providing a platform for business as well as acting like an
innovation partner (Guillemette and Pare, 2012; Weill and
Woerner, 2016) for digital innovation, incorporating much
of what CDOs describe as the ‘‘digital’’ logic of action. Future
studies could explore the digital logic without the explicit
focus on a specific role and sample for executives driving
digital innovation across various professional arrangements.
Nevertheless, this study describes how CDOs, as institu-
tional entrepreneurs, can carve out a space in organizations
with well-established, institutional orders for their innovative
trajectories. This view highlights the cultural, discursive
element of distinguishing the logic of the field from
established logics, thus allowing for the construction of a
distinct jurisdiction. Further, this view details the various
dynamic processes that those institutional entrepreneurs take
with respect to existing institutionalized functions. Each of
the processes is distinct and brings its own advantages and
disadvantages. Future research could examine outcomes
associated with different approaches and the longer-term
dynamics of different processes, as time passes and the role
either matures or fades away.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for the support and time the CDOs dedicated to
participate in the study, as well as the editorial and reviewer team for
constructive and challenging comments. Also, we are thankful for
the opportunity to present earlier versions of the manuscript during
the KIN (The Knowledge, Information and Innovation Research
S Tumbas et al.
Group) ‘‘Workshop Organizing for Digital Innovation’’ in Amster-
dam 2016.
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About the Authors
Sanja Tumbas is an assistant professor in information
systems at IESE Business School. She received her Ph.D. from
S Tumbas et al.
University of Liechtenstein and was a visiting Ph.D. student
at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on
digitalization in young entrepreneurial organizations as well
as digital transformation of large established firms.
Nicholas Berente is an associate professor of management
information systems at the University of Georgia’s Terry
College of Business and a research fellow with the University
of Liechtenstein. He received his Ph.D. from Case Western
Reserve University. His research interests include organiza-
tional routines and institutional change, digital innovation,
and cyber infrastructure.
Jan vom Brocke is a full professor for information systems
and Hilti Endowed Chair of Business Process Management at
University of Liechtenstein. He is a Director of the Institute
of Information Systems and Vice President of the Association
for Information Systems (AIS). His research focuses on
aspects of digital innovation and organizational transforma-
tion, including business process management and informa-
tion systems design.