ABSTRACT
Research suggests that many organizations are struggling to embrace digital opportunities and rewire themselves as digital organizations. While technology obviously plays a central role in their digital transformation journeys, this chapter argues that building a digital capability is not so much a technology challenge as it is a challenge to harness knowledge to create the organizational knowing to continually optimize the value derived from digital technologies. This knowledge is dispersed across an organization making it difficult to coordinate and integrate. Drawing on both the resource-based view of the firm and social capital theory, this chapter presents the scaffold for positioning the digital capability. It emphasizes the essential role of human action in knowing how to get things done that lies at the heart of a digital capability. The chapter concludes with some implications for building a digital capability, in particular the role of practices.
