Digitale Innovationen, Handwerksorganisationen und Fractional CIO

The advancing digitisation and digital transformation are having a disruptive effect on production and value creation processes, job profiles and jobs. The opportunities this opens up include an increase in productivity and quality, e.g. of customer-oriented services, the implementation of sustainable value creation models and an increase in employee satisfaction. Numerous support offers help the craft sector with (digital) innovation. And yet the craft sector regularly lags behind in digitisation. Why is this the case? Because the (fractional) CIO is missing at least in the 80% of micro and small craft businesses (up to 10 employees).

This paper examines the topic of (digital) innovation in craft businesses and the evaluation of existing digitalisation support programmes. It also addresses the potential removal of significant barriers to digitisation using Kratzer et al.’s Fractional CIO, which currently is accessible in theory, at least in Germany. Here, the emphasis is on determining whether and how the previously described Fractional CIO could be included into the current craft organisation service ecosystem. A further discussion is around the possibility of realising the Fractional CIO concept through the integration of actors and resources of skilled crafts organisations.