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Digital market intermediation has emerged as the dominant coordination mechanism in contemporary business environments, fundamentally altering how firms identify, create, and capture value. Traditional firm-centric value chains are giving way to platform-dominated ecosystems in which digital intermediaries orchestrate multi-sided interactions, govern complementor participation, and redistribute strategic agency across previously independent actors. This theory-development article synthesizes insights from platform ecosystem research to reconceptualize the evolving role of firms as active participants rather than autonomous orchestrators. We argue that digital intermediation transforms value creation from sequential, firm-controlled processes into distributed, ecosystem-embedded mechanisms that rely on platform governance, complementor coordination, and dynamic strategic positioning. By integrating literature on platform strategy, ecosystem governance, and value-chain reconfiguration, the article develops a novel theoretical framework centered on six propositions that explicate causal relationships between intermediation intensity, governance alignment, and sustained value appropriation. The proposed conceptualization advances digital business theory by shifting analytical focus from firm-level capabilities to platform-mediated relational dynamics. Theoretical and managerial implications highlight the necessity for firms to develop intermediation-specific competencies to maintain competitive relevance in platform-dominated markets. Future research directions emphasize longitudinal examination of governance evolution and cross-platform value migration.

Firms face an expanding set of digital transformation opportunities, including process automation, analytics platforms, customer experience systems, artificial intelligence applications, cloud migration, and ecosystem integration. These opportunities promise efficiency, growth, responsiveness, and innovation, but they also compete for limited financial, technical, managerial, and organizational resources. As a result, digital transformation is increasingly a problem of strategic selection rather than simply technological adoption. Many organizations struggle to distinguish between initiatives that are strategically essential, operationally attractive, technically fashionable, or politically sponsored. Without a structured prioritisation approach, firms may approve too many initiatives at once, spread scarce resources across weakly connected projects, and create initiative overload. This can produce fragmented execution, duplicated investment, capability strain, and weak alignment between digital spending and strategic objectives. This article develops the Digital Transformation Priority Framework as a practical decision framework for selecting and sequencing digital transformation initiatives. The framework evaluates initiatives through three pillars: strategic value, capability readiness, and implementation risk. It is designed to help managers make transparent prioritisation decisions when competing initiatives differ in expected value, organizational preparedness, and execution uncertainty. The article is based on a conceptual synthesis of peer-reviewed articles published across strategic management, information systems, project portfolio management, digital transformation, and decision sciences. It does not report new empirical data. Instead, it integrates existing research into a practical model that managers can use to structure judgment, compare alternatives, and communicate prioritisation decisions. The framework provides assessment criteria and scoring guidelines for each pillar, integrates the three assessments into a unified prioritisation logic, and demonstrates managerial application through a decision matrix. Five tables specify strategic value dimensions, capability readiness indicators, implementation risk categories, the integrated prioritisation model, and an example portfolio application. The article concludes that systematic prioritisation can improve resource allocation, reduce initiative fatigue, and ensure that digital transformation efforts are strategically focused and execution-ready.