Under Pressure: an Ethnographic Report from an Ambidextrous IPaaS Platform Entity
Lene Pettersen · Proceedings of the ... Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences/Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences · 2024
This paper presents the findings of an ethnographic field study in a Scandinavian company ("Magic") offering its clients a cloud-based semantic integration platform as a Service (iPaaS).The platform seeks to enable the integration of data in new ways and thus assist organizations with their digital transformation.The company was established as a subsidiary unit of its parent IT consultancy, representing a well-known strategy to spark radical change and innovation-termed the 'ambidextrous solution' in the literature.The paper examines how the ambidextrous framework fit when the subsidiary is a digital platform.New dimensions that include key differences between the pipeline parent and the platform subsidiary is added to the ambidextrous framework.Some of the findings point to several risks for Magic becoming a mini version of the parent firm.As a result, Magic risks being outperformed by big American platform players, such as Google.