How can the digitalization of scheduling enable location strategies?

This paper explores how a processual approach can lead to the development of digital adaptation mechanisms for resilient operations in the digital society. This form of conceptualization implies a change of enterprise, from one state to another. Recent events such as the lingering COVID-19 pandemic proved that the current operating models of enterprises are woefully unprepared for interconnected, but disruptive global events despite Castells (2000) warning that there was already a shift to a ‘technological paradigm of the ‘network society’, or in the contemporary sense, the “post-industrial” digital society. In this technological paradigm, the ‘network’ concept is used as an organizing metaphor in which new forms of flexible and adaptable organizational structures are required to address the digital challenges facing enterprises today, yet the hierarchical ‘factory’ model of the industrial revolution remains dominant in contemporary enterprises. The adaptability of the enterprise to the new ‘technological paradigm’ remains challenging to navigate, evidenced through the pattern of digital transformation failures documented in both academic (Oludapo et al., 2024)and practitioner literature, even as the societal trends of ubiquitous data, unlimited connectivity and massive processing power are driving disruptions in several sectors of the digital society (Ross, 2019). These social trends, spurred by the commercialization of the Internet in the early 1990s, resulted in a step-change in the complexity of the effective world (Merali, 2006) resulting in various dilemmas, the root causes of which can be explored by challenging the assumptions of technological determinism that characterize many current digitalization initiatives. These undesirable outcomes from the implications of the three social trends and the assumptions linked to technological determinism (Oludapo et al., 2024) have seen emergence of dilemmas linked to increased dynamism, uncertainty and discontinuity in the competitive context, increased pressure for fast decision making under conditions of greater informational uncertainty due to global conflicts, increased importance of (internal and external) intelligence and the importance of flexibility and adaptability (and learning) for survival. To transcend technological determinism, Castells emphasized the need to recognize technologies as enablers, a concept which has improved understanding of digitalization, but remains limiting. Much more recently, Shapiro and Jean Ross have called for considering digital technologies as ‘inspiration’, that is, they inspire and are the foundation for rapid business innovations. While some (Following Piccoli et al., (2024), the view of digital transformation as the metamorphosis of an IT-enabled organization into a digital organization – is used to motivate for a digital architecture, based on design principles. This paper adopts a systems perspective to explore how a process-based approach can lead to addressing these dilemmas guided by the following research question:“How can a process-based approach guide the development of digital adaptation mechanism for resilient operations?”