Development of a Self-Assessment Tool for Digital-Savviness

Thesis (MA)

Advisor(s): Altus Viljoen (altus.viljoen@tum.de) and Anna Keilbach (anna.keilbach@tum.de)

Context

Disruptive digital technologies create new value-creation potentials for incumbent manufacturing firms. However, successful digital transformation (DT) in production and logistics requires a digitally-savvy workforce, encompassing a digital mindset and novel capabilities, as a necessary criterion for success. This does not mean that the entire workforce must acquire programming skills, but that there is a fundamental understanding of the potential added value of digital solutions in all areas. Hence, digital-savviness enables employees at all levels to actively contribute to DT.

A clear understanding of employees' current level of digital-savviness (at the individual and team level) provides a starting point for incumbents to derive guidelines for achieving the required level of digital-savviness. One way to accomplish this would be to develop and implement a self-assessment tool. Thus, the goal of this thesis is the iterative development of criteria and questions for a self-assessment tool based on scientific results and our case partner’s input (an automotive firm). This includes to synthesize the literature, develop a self-assessment tool that captures the measurement of digital-savviness, and test the self-assessment tool at our automotive case study.

Task(s)

• Review relevant literature and structure extant knowledge in the respective field
• Synthesize and operationalize different items of digital-savviness
• Conduct the self-assessment survey to measure digital savviness on an individual and team level
• Derive guidelines how to achieve digital savviness at our case of an automotive firm

Requirements

• High degree of autonomy and individual responsibility
• Interest in research in the field of DT
• Experience in the conduction of a survey research would be beneficial

Further Information

The thesis can be written in English or German. The topic can also be adapted to your interests to some extent. If you have further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me directly. Please send your application including our application form, a current transcript of records, and your CV to altus.viljoen@tum.de and anna.keilbach@tum.de. Please note that we can only consider applications with complete documents.