Information System Strategy for Opportunity Discovery and Exploitation: Insights from Business Model Transformation

For a large enterprise to design a new business model, business managers are unlikely to determine the precise set of choices required to create and capture value. Instead, they are more likely to organize processes to determine the set of choices. Traditionally, an information system (IS) is viewed as the facilitator for opportunity exploitation when a new business model is assumed to be fully formulated; however, when the business model is not fully formulated, the role of the IS as the facilitator for opportunity discovery has been greatly overlooked. Using an in-depth case study of a large enterprise that is designing its next business model, we find that an IS can be used to facilitate opportunity discovery in formulating the narrative and numeric logics of a new business model and can facilitate opportunity exploitation in reconfiguring IS resources.