Not at all Ambidextrous: Industrialized Business/IT Transformation at UPM

Despite the undoubted importance of IT-enabled transformations for sustaining firm competitiveness, we are only at the beginning of understanding the conflicts and resolution strategies in IT transformation program planning and execution. Given the well-known global versus local tensions, practitioners might be tempted to balance the different extremes by remaining ‘ambidextrous’ throughout these multi-year initiatives. The case of the transformation of manufacturing processes at UPM demonstrates vividly that this is not always advisable: After an initial ambidextrous approach had failed painfully, UPM took an ‘industrialized’ strategy guided by five principles described in this paper. While UPM applied different balancing mechanisms on the program execution level, the industrialized principles demanded extreme resolution strategies on the planning level to manage the turnaround and achieve the desired benefits. Besides providing insights on each principle’s key mechanisms, UPM’s learnings emphasize the important, but undertheorized fit to business strategy in leading IT-enabled change.