ECIS 2026 (2026) AI Processed
NAVIGATING THE TWIN TRANSITION: A PARADOX PERSPECTIVE ON CONCURRENT DIGITAL AND SUSTAINABILITY CHANGE
This paper conducts an exploratory, embedded case study of 'BankIT,' a major European IT service provider, to examine concurrent digital and sustainability transformations. Drawing on paradox theory, the researchers investigate how organizations experience and navigate the competing demands that arise during this 'twin transition.'
Problem
Although digital and sustainability goals are frequently portrayed as highly complementary, empirical research on how these dual agendas conflict in everyday practice is scarce. Organizations struggle to move beyond high-level alignment rhetoric because they lack concrete understanding of the persistent, non-negotiable tensions that actors face on the ground.
Outcome
- The study qualitatively identifies four persistent tensions in the twin transition: cost efficiency vs. sustainability impact, IT as enabler vs. IT as concern, individual values vs. organizational inertia, and fast IT iteration vs. slow sustainability institutionalization, though these are exploratory and not statistically tested.\n- The findings reveal that actors manage these paradoxes through a portfolio of splitting, suppressing, adjusting, and opposing responses, which often remain fragmented rather than coordinated.\n- Successful navigation was shown to occur gradually through sequencing and formalizing responses (such as in UI/UX accessibility standards), indicating that twin transition synergies are an outcome of continuous paradox management rather than a starting condition.\n- The study's findings are limited by its exploratory nature and single-case, cross-sectional design at one European IT service provider, meaning they are not statistically generalizable.
What it means for you
- CIO / IT Executive: On Monday morning, update your organization's 'Definition of Done' (DoD) for all software release pipelines to mandate that any major code deployment must include a documented estimate of its cloud carbon footprint (using tools like Cloud Carbon Footprint) alongside traditional speed and cost metrics.
- IT Manager: On Monday morning, during your weekly sprint planning, introduce one concrete green-coding or UI accessibility standard (such as optimizing image compression to reduce data transfer energy) to the active backlog, demonstrating to your team how to integrate sustainability into fast-paced IT iterations.
- Business Strategist: On Monday morning, review your active digital transformation roadmaps and replace any assumptions of automatic 'twin transition' synergies with a formal risk register that explicitly maps out where digital speed and carbon-reduction goals conflict, scheduling a sequenced timeline for which priority takes precedence at each milestone.
- Researcher: On Monday morning, draft a research proposal for a longitudinal, multi-sector quantitative survey targeting CIOs across Europe to statistically test the generalizability of the four identified twin-transition tensions beyond the single-case IT service provider context.
- Policymaker: On Monday morning, initiate the draft of a voluntary 'Green IT Integration' compliance guide that provides businesses with standardized templates to formalize digital-sustainability KPIs, helping them move from fragmented employee-led initiatives to structured, audit-ready corporate reporting.
Transcript
Host: Welcome to A.I.S. Insights - Turning IS Research into Business Action. I am your host, Anna Ivy Summers, and today we are looking at how organizations handle two of the biggest corporate agendas of our time: digital transformation and sustainability. The study we are focusing on is titled "NAVIGATING THE TWIN TRANSITION: A PARADOX PERSPECTIVE ON CONCURRENT DIGITAL AND SUSTAINABILITY CHANGE." It looks at what happens when these two massive initiatives run side-by-side in an organization. Joining me to break this down is our expert analyst, Alex Ian Sutherland. Welcome, Alex.
Expert: Thank you, Anna. It is great to be here to discuss this study.
Host: Let's start with the big problem this study addresses. We often hear that digital tools and sustainability naturally go hand-in-hand. The term "twin transition" suggests they support each other. But is that actually what happens in daily business operations?
Expert: That is exactly the tension the researchers wanted to investigate. While high-level strategic plans often paint a picture of perfect harmony, empirical research on how these two agendas actually collide on the ground is quite limited. In practice, organizations struggle because they face very real, non-negotiable tensions that are not easily solved by a single management decision.
Host: How did the researchers go about exploring this?
Expert: They conducted an exploratory, embedded case study of a major European IT service provider pseudonymized as "BankIT." BankIT provides critical infrastructure like core banking and data management solutions. They recently aligned their corporate strategy with ESG principles while simultaneously modernizing their core platforms. One of the authors spent six months as an independent internal researcher at BankIT, conducting interviews and analyzing over eight hundred pages of strategy and project documents.
Host: Since this is an exploratory, single-case study, I assume the findings are not statistically generalizable?
Expert: That is correct. Because of its cross-sectional and single-case design, we cannot statistically generalize these findings across all industries. However, the study provides highly detailed, practical insights into how these tensions play out.
Host: What did the study find? What are these daily tensions that managers face?
Expert: The study identified four persistent tensions. The first is cost efficiency versus sustainability impact. For example, a server virtualization project was done to save costs, and while it did reduce emissions, no one actually recorded or tracked the carbon savings. The researchers call this "accidental sustainability," where economic goals completely shadow environmental ones because there are no dual metrics in place.
Host: So, if you do not measure it, the environmental benefit is basically invisible. What is the second tension?
Expert: The second is IT as an enabler versus IT as a sustainability concern. BankIT sells software that helps clients meet ESG regulations, but running those very services requires more data center capacity, which increases their own energy consumption. It is a structural paradox where you cannot easily abandon either side.
Host: That sounds like a tough balancing act. What about the other two tensions?
Expert: The third is individual sustainability values versus organizational inertia. Many employees personally care deeply about sustainability, but because the corporate structures do not explicitly integrate these values into daily project steering, employee efforts remain isolated and grassroots-driven. Finally, the fourth tension is fast IT iteration cycles versus slow sustainability institutionalization. Technology upgrades happen rapidly, while establishing robust sustainability standards and metrics for thousands of products takes years.
Host: How did the employees at BankIT actually manage these tensions?
Expert: They used a mix of responses like splitting, suppressing, adjusting, and opposing. For instance, with the IT enabler paradox, they used spatial splitting by keeping ESG-related product teams separate from the core infrastructure teams. With the lifecycle speed paradox, they used temporal splitting, delaying sustainability decisions to future upgrade cycles. The issue is that these responses often remained fragmented across the company rather than being coordinated at a strategic level.
Host: That brings us to the most important part for our listeners: what can business and technology professionals actually do with this knowledge? How do we use these insights to improve our own twin transitions?
Expert: First, do not assume digital and sustainability synergies will happen automatically. The study shows that synergies are an outcome of continuous paradox management, not a starting condition. Second, companies need to implement dual metrics. If you only track financial KPIs, you will continue to have "accidental sustainability" and miss opportunities to optimize environmental impact. Third, look for ways to transition from informal, grassroots adjustments to formalized standards. At BankIT, they found success when team-level digital accessibility adjustments were eventually formalized into company-wide UI/UX standards.
Host: So, it is about moving from fragmented, accidental efforts to structured, continuous navigation.
Expert: Exactly. Managers should map these four tensions in their own organizations, make the invisible trade-offs visible, and build formal governance structures to manage them over time.
Host: This provides a very practical way to look at two of our biggest business challenges. Thank you, Alex, for sharing these insights, and thank you to our listeners for tuning in to A.I.S. Insights. We will see you next time.
Expert: Thank you, Anna. It is great to be here to discuss this study.
Host: Let's start with the big problem this study addresses. We often hear that digital tools and sustainability naturally go hand-in-hand. The term "twin transition" suggests they support each other. But is that actually what happens in daily business operations?
Expert: That is exactly the tension the researchers wanted to investigate. While high-level strategic plans often paint a picture of perfect harmony, empirical research on how these two agendas actually collide on the ground is quite limited. In practice, organizations struggle because they face very real, non-negotiable tensions that are not easily solved by a single management decision.
Host: How did the researchers go about exploring this?
Expert: They conducted an exploratory, embedded case study of a major European IT service provider pseudonymized as "BankIT." BankIT provides critical infrastructure like core banking and data management solutions. They recently aligned their corporate strategy with ESG principles while simultaneously modernizing their core platforms. One of the authors spent six months as an independent internal researcher at BankIT, conducting interviews and analyzing over eight hundred pages of strategy and project documents.
Host: Since this is an exploratory, single-case study, I assume the findings are not statistically generalizable?
Expert: That is correct. Because of its cross-sectional and single-case design, we cannot statistically generalize these findings across all industries. However, the study provides highly detailed, practical insights into how these tensions play out.
Host: What did the study find? What are these daily tensions that managers face?
Expert: The study identified four persistent tensions. The first is cost efficiency versus sustainability impact. For example, a server virtualization project was done to save costs, and while it did reduce emissions, no one actually recorded or tracked the carbon savings. The researchers call this "accidental sustainability," where economic goals completely shadow environmental ones because there are no dual metrics in place.
Host: So, if you do not measure it, the environmental benefit is basically invisible. What is the second tension?
Expert: The second is IT as an enabler versus IT as a sustainability concern. BankIT sells software that helps clients meet ESG regulations, but running those very services requires more data center capacity, which increases their own energy consumption. It is a structural paradox where you cannot easily abandon either side.
Host: That sounds like a tough balancing act. What about the other two tensions?
Expert: The third is individual sustainability values versus organizational inertia. Many employees personally care deeply about sustainability, but because the corporate structures do not explicitly integrate these values into daily project steering, employee efforts remain isolated and grassroots-driven. Finally, the fourth tension is fast IT iteration cycles versus slow sustainability institutionalization. Technology upgrades happen rapidly, while establishing robust sustainability standards and metrics for thousands of products takes years.
Host: How did the employees at BankIT actually manage these tensions?
Expert: They used a mix of responses like splitting, suppressing, adjusting, and opposing. For instance, with the IT enabler paradox, they used spatial splitting by keeping ESG-related product teams separate from the core infrastructure teams. With the lifecycle speed paradox, they used temporal splitting, delaying sustainability decisions to future upgrade cycles. The issue is that these responses often remained fragmented across the company rather than being coordinated at a strategic level.
Host: That brings us to the most important part for our listeners: what can business and technology professionals actually do with this knowledge? How do we use these insights to improve our own twin transitions?
Expert: First, do not assume digital and sustainability synergies will happen automatically. The study shows that synergies are an outcome of continuous paradox management, not a starting condition. Second, companies need to implement dual metrics. If you only track financial KPIs, you will continue to have "accidental sustainability" and miss opportunities to optimize environmental impact. Third, look for ways to transition from informal, grassroots adjustments to formalized standards. At BankIT, they found success when team-level digital accessibility adjustments were eventually formalized into company-wide UI/UX standards.
Host: So, it is about moving from fragmented, accidental efforts to structured, continuous navigation.
Expert: Exactly. Managers should map these four tensions in their own organizations, make the invisible trade-offs visible, and build formal governance structures to manage them over time.
Host: This provides a very practical way to look at two of our biggest business challenges. Thank you, Alex, for sharing these insights, and thank you to our listeners for tuning in to A.I.S. Insights. We will see you next time.