Digitalization and Platformization for Sustainability: The Case of the Oil and Gas Industry
摘要
This chapter examines and discusses digitalization and platformization and their implications for sustainability in the Oil and Gas industry. By using illustrative examples from qualitative research projects and literature from information systems and strategy, the chapter exposes incremental solutions for sustainability. Four characteristics of digitalization, namely automating, informating, representing, and mediating, show how incremental innovation provides sustainability benefits through energy efficiency and emission reduction in industrial operations. The three platformization characteristics of standardizing, opening, and investing expose energy usage and emissions through monitoring, reducing, and reporting tools. Digitalization is mainly organization- and function-centric for value creation and capture, while platformization focuses on data in ecosystems. The actual sustainability improvements are in the hands of the organizations where the digital technologies are merely intermediate tools to achieve a sustainability transition. Digitalization enables organizations to change, while platformization may facilitate several organizations, entire ecosystems and industries to handle the sustainability transition.