Table Of ContentManagement 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
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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
