Impacts of digital technologies on Professional Service Firms
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2022-11-10
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Brito, Luiz Artur Ledur
Orsato, Renato J.
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Digital technologies play a key role in driving societal transformations. Their impacts are now visible even in industries once considered immune to major technological advances; professional services among them. Accordingly, a growing body of research focuses on questions such as the impact of technology on the education of professionals, its impact on professional identity, and especially on whether professionals might be replaced by technology. Less attention has been given from a management perspective, focusing on the impacts of technology for professional service firms and their strategies. I address this gap by investigating the impacts of digital technologies on professional service firms, considering consequences on a societal level, industry level and firm level. This dissertation is organized as a set of three papers. On the first paper, based on secondary data, I investigated the presence of platforms in the professional service industry; I noted this new organizational form might significantly change the way professional services are made available to society and suggested an analytical framework indicating consequences for competitive analyses. Secondly, qualitative research using semi-structured interviews enabled me to depict the emergence of a new legal services ecosystem – a new development at industry level – and argue that this changing environment requires additional strategy considerations. Finally, the same set of interviews allowed me to explore how technology could change the resource needs of law firms without necessarily requiring adjustments to the prevailing taxonomy of Professional Service Firms (PSFs). Practitioners can greatly benefit from my analysis, as I shed light on how digital technologies might impact the application of strategy concepts. From a theoretical perspective, I conclude the digital era has consequences for the application of positioning and resource-based view considerations, even in a traditional industry.