Murariu, Florica

Business Technology Management (BTM) Executives and Digital Transformation Leadership

Florica Lacramioara (Lily) Murariu

Business Technology Management (BTM) is an emerging profession dedicated to leading the Digital Transformation of organizations and industries. Given their evolving roles and competency profile, we study how executives address the tasks of mobilizing peers, employees, resources, technologies, and partners in leveraging IT for innovative projects. We focus on the public sector given its distinct set of constraints and the urgency of improving digital project performance and governance. Digital transformation and innovation are high priorities as governments try to improve service quality while reducing budgets, including information technology (IT) capital and operating expenditures. In this context, Chief Information Officers (CIOs), and their new counterpart/superior Chief Digital Officers (CDOs), are challenged to find cheaper and yet more effective solutions to help their organization become lean and agile, while building upon prior enterprise-scale IT projects. Our theoretical model builds upon Organizational Project Management (OPM) research to enrich BTM with a new executive competency model. Using a comparative case study methodology, we analyze the evolving digital transformation project leadership approaches of 10 large public sector organizations. Sampling opportunistically within the same government makes our study more comparable within the digital policy context. We carry interviews with CIOs in two periods (2016 and 2021) and identify the lineage of the more stable competencies linked to digital project success at the senior executive level. The information was collected from the interviews conducted and the observations made during the interviews. A model emerges from the field study of the new roles of BTM executives along IT governance processes in the public sector.