Management for Professionals Joachim Klewes Dirk Popp Manuela Rost-Hein Editors Out-thinking Organizational Communications The Impact of Digital Transformation Management for Professionals More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/10101 Joachim Klewes • Dirk Popp • Manuela Rost-Hein Editors Out-thinking Organizational Communications The Impact of Digital Transformation Editors Joachim Klewes Dirk Popp Ketchum Pleon GmbH Berlin, Germany Berlin, Germany Manuela Rost-Hein Ketchum Pleon GmbH Berlin, Germany ISSN 2192-8096 ISSN 2192-810X (electronic) Management for Professionals ISBN 978-3-319-41844-5 ISBN 978-3-319-41845-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41845-2 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950718 # Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 This work is subject to copyright. 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Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland Contents Digital Transformation and the Challenges for Organizational Communications: An Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Joachim Klewes, Dirk Popp, and Manuela Rost-Hein Digital Transformation and Communications: How Key Trends Will Transform the Way Companies Communicate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Joachim Klewes, Dirk Popp, and Manuela Rost-Hein Why we Might Wish to Be Governed by Algorithms: Insights into a Technophile Digital Mindset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Christopher Peterka Policy and Politics in the Era of the Industrial Internet: How the Digital Transformation Will Change the Political Arena . . . . . 49 Giuseppe Porcaro The Changing Role of the Chief Marketing Officer: Unlocking the Power of Data-Driven Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Marilies Rumpold-Preining The Role of Corporate Communication in the Digital Age: An Era of Change for the Communication Profession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Grazia Murtarelli It’s About Trust: The IT Department’s Role in a Digital Organisation: Why Techies May Be the New Communications Team . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Wayne Pales Digital Transformation of Energy Companies: The Role of Disruptive Communication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Christian Ammer New Challenges of the Digital Transformation: The Comeback of the Vision-Mission System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Guido Wolf v vi Contents Mention Communication—Think Organisation: Agile Communication in the Digital Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Eric-Jan Kaak From Customer Service to Customer Experience: The Drivers, Risks and Opportunities of Digital Transformation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145 Lumir Boureanu Car Sales in the Throes of Change: Aims for Total Customer Experience in the Digital Era . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Jochen Sengpiehl The Global Web in Regional Politics: The Regulatory and Political Debate on Digitalisation and the Internet of Things . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Stefan Denig Managing the Digital Transformation: Ten Guidelines for Communications Professionals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Joachim Klewes, Dirk Popp, and Manuela Rost-Hein About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 Digital Transformation and the Challenges for Organizational Communications: An Introduction Joachim Klewes, Dirk Popp, and Manuela Rost-Hein Communications professionals, especially those with an Anglo-American orienta- tion, are often seen as pioneers in identifying trends in business and society and putting them to use for their organizations. Be it the first corporate websites in the early 1990s or, ten years later, the precursors of social media, corporate communicators were among the first to use the new technologies and to set an example at companies as early adopters. This claim can no longer be made so unequivocally for the facets of the digital transformation that are dealt with in this anthology. When it comes to Industry 4.0, the Industrial Internet and, in the wider sense of term, the Internet of Things (IoT) as an important manifestation of the digital transformation, voices from technology, business development and strategy teams have so far been heard louder and more clearly. Professional communicators are still so involved in understanding the repercussions of technological developments on the core of their profession (the most effective dialogue possible with different target groups) and on implementing them in times of dwindling communication resources that dealing with the issues raised in this edited book has been somewhat on the selective side. We, however, are convinced that developments ranging from the smart factory and the revolution in business models, from technological disruption across the bandwidth of the Internet of Things to artificial intelligence, will be of such fundamental relevance for the development of professional communication (from both the corporate and the market perspective) that addressing them systematically is worthwhile and, indeed, overdue. J. Klewes (*) • M. Rost-Hein Ketchum Pleon Germany, Berlin, Germany e-mail: 2 J. Klewes et al. In this anthology, we make a first attempt to do so, knowing of course that we are presenting more of an extract and a preliminary result than a clear picture. We asked authors from different companies, different countries, from research and practice to take a look from their individual perspective at a subject defined solely in outline. That is why this collection of essays does not particularly follow a predefined editorial concept. It took shape more in dialogue with the authors and would look different in half a year’s time. May our readers see it as a starting point for making their way through the still largely uncharted jungle of new developments in the digital revolution. The authors represented in this anthology are key representatives of their respective disciplines. What they share, in addition to their proximity to communications, is a critical attitude towards the challenges and fundamental upheavals that the digital transformation is bringing about in a wide range of value chains and the day-to-day working world of countless professionals. It is all the more important to stress at this point that the collection of essays reflect this creative disruption as an opportunity and present the challenges for the discipline in question as exemplary. The series of essays begins with a fundamental contribution by the editors. We identify several fundamental challenges with which, in the context of digital transformation, professional communication for companies and organizations must cope. Building on a clarification of the IoT, the Industrial Internet and other key concepts, we describe the role of corporate communications in the three industrial epochs that preceded today’s emergence of Industry 4.0. Four trend “worlds” of the current digital transformation phase constitute the core of our contribution. They are technology, business, organization and society—each with three specific trends. Each of these twelve trends is investigated for its relevance for communication and communicators before, at the end of their chapter, we tackle the question of whether “communication as a profession” might disappear as a conse- quence of the digital transformation. Taking as his example the Generation Y of digital natives whose youth in and around the millennium already bore the hallmark of the Internet, Christopher Peterka shows how the digitalisation processes that lie ahead will change our day-to-day lives and our thinking. The essay’s title “Why we Might Wish to Be Governed by Algorithms” hits the nail on the head when Peterka argues that the changes Big Data and digitalisation bring about should be seen more as an oppor- tunity than as a dystopia. Instead of a hesitant adaptation Peterka shows how machines and algorithms successively improve handling information as the basis for a problem solution. Communications professionals and managers could as early adopters of these processes play a leading role in the digital age by virtue of being able to teach individuals and enterprises how to handle digitalisation processes. Giuseppe Porcaro then looks at the narratives with which the protagonists of Industry 4.0 accompany its development. They emphasise, unsurprisingly, the positive effects for all stakeholders, culminating in the concept of the outcome economy, a business model that might be conceivable but would be anything but promising without digital technologies. What is sold is the final effect of a technol- ogy: not the car but the mobility, not the plant protection product but the higher Digital Transformation and the Challenges for Organizational Communications:. . . 3 wheat yield per hectare. The outcome economy corresponds to a certain style of politics: evidence-based policymaking that with increasing technological progress will develop into algorithm-based policymaking in which outcome providers offer data-based solutions on behalf of politics. Think for example of health-promoting effects in the prevention sector. Porcaro uses a number of creatively chosen examples to show the consequences that these developments could have for politi- cal communication, such as if data acquired via sensors in, say, the traffic sector, were to be used in real time in political campaigns. The fact that customers’ roles are set to undergo enormous changes in the course of the digital revolution is taken up at different points in this book. Marilies Rumpold-Preining considers in her chapter the resulting new challenges that CMOs will face. She focuses on the fast-changing expectations of customers and their growing importance as co-shapers of innovations, both of which are based on technologically facilitated access opportunities. That is why she refers to the need to gain a better understanding of customer expectations and feedback by means of new forms of data capture and processing. That means to rethink everything through the lens of customer experience while infusing digital DNA into the team and using data-driven decision-making to deliver customer experiences that are personalized, relevant and timely. While Marilies Rumpold-Preining sets her sights mainly on the marketing dimension of communication, Grazia Murtarelli has corporate communications more in mind. In a systematic way, she defines its role in the digital age. In the core of her chapter, she stresses that the benefits of the Industrial Internet and the digital transformation can only come into their corporate own if barriers between departments are dismantled and they can collaborate as freely as possible. The consequence is that demands on employees will increase at all levels, requiring them to deal skilfully with the new tidal waves of information and manage them. Murtarelli describes in detail four challenges that the experts must face. The transformation of information under the influence of Big Data, she argues, will confront experts of all kinds with the fundamental challenge to create value from data-based applications, leading for communicators and related lines of business to the challenge to distil “compelling stories” from the available data in accordance with customers’ preferences. That in turn will lead to the fundamental question of whether the available data can be evaluated efficiently and what role algorithms will have to play in the process. Under the headings Internet of Things and the algorithm economy, Murtarelli defines as the final challenge nothing less than the (total) repositioning of communicators in terms of the role that communicators might play in handling Big Data and what would then change in the profession’s requirements profile. In his chapter, Wayne Pales notes that trust will gain in importance as a central concept in the age of digitalisation. The reason he cites is the enormous importance of data integrity and data protection at many companies. Taking power utilities as his example, he works out in detail how, with increasingly local processing of data, the role of the IT department will increasingly change. Trust management might even as a result of the digital transformation be transferred from corporate