The Co-Evolution of Digital, Commercial, and Transformational Practices: Unfolding the Digital...

Incumbent firms increasingly develop adaptive digital services that allow a high degree of scaling and customization. However, the digital service commercialization process requires understanding digital practices and commercial practices as well as the role that digital infrastructure plays in these practices. More importantly, as social and material activities are inherently entangled, firms must understand transformational practices of problematizing, envisioning, and testing digital solutions. However, we know little about how the digital service commercialization process unfolds as an incumbent firm's digital maturity progresses through the co-evolution of digital, commercial, and transformational practices. To address this research gap, we examine a longitudinal single case study of a world-leading bank's effort to develop a digital infrastructure that would simultaneously allow adaptive digital service delivery at the corporate customer front-end and, at the same time, leverage scalability at the back-end. The study presents a process-based framework as Delta bank progresses from provisional digital services to more adaptive digital services. Each phase of the process is divided into digital, commercial, and transformational practices that co-evolve over time from initially diverging, then locally converging, and finally entangling in the last phase. The study contributes to the practice theory perspective on digital service, and the evolutionary perspective on digital transformation more broadly. Keywords: commercialization process, digital practices, practice theory, digital transformation.