Exploring the BIG Five of e-leadership by developing digital strategies with mobile, cloud, big data, social media, and the Internet of things

Recent developments in digital technologies -- 1) mobile technology, 2) cloud computing, 3) big data, 4) social media, and 5) the Internet of Things -- show that these so-called BIG Five technologies are increasingly transforming organizations by enabling business innovation. This paper aims to explore if these technologies are used strategically by these organizations. The novelty of this paper is in providing an understanding of the interplay of the five digital technologies and their potential to enable business innovation (i.e. process innovation, product/service innovation, and business model innovation) by using examples from industry (as found in our literature review). A structured literature study is performed for the big five technologies individually and in relation to digital strategy. The theoretical contribution is a three level eleadership model directed to customer orientation. As a practical contribution we show seven cases analysed by four independent research assistants in which social media strategies overall score high on a Likert scale and big data scores high in some cases but low in other cases. The combined mobile, cloud and Internet of things technologies show overall an above average score. The third contribution confirms recent literature that big five technology implementations are still too much process oriented. In only two cases a shift toward product orientation was found.