Extant literature has increased our understanding of specific aspects of digital transformation, however we lack a comprehensive portrait of its nature and implications. Through a review of 282 works, we inductively build a framework of digital transformation articulated across eight building blocks. Our framework foregrounds digital transformation as a process where digital technologies create disruptions triggering strategic responses from organizations that seek to alter their value creation paths while managing the structural changes and organizational barriers that affect the positive and negative outcomes of this process. Building on this framework, we elaborate a research agenda that proposes [1] examining the role of dynamic capabilities, and [2] accounting for ethical issues as important avenues for future strategic IS research on digital transformation.

Understanding digital transformation: A review and a research agenda

New digital technologies present both game-changing opportunities for—and existential threats to—companies whose success was built in the pre-digital economy. This article describes our findings from a study of 25 companies that were embarking on digital transformation journeys. We identified two digital strategies—customer engagement and digitized solutions—that provide direction for a digital transformation. Two technology-enabled assets are essential for executing those strategies: an operational backbone and a digital services platform. We describe how a big old company can combine these elements to navigate its digital transformation.

/pdf/how-big-old-companies-navigate-digital-transformation-4fxhbvercq.pdf

How Big Old Companies Navigate Digital Transformation

The rapid growth of digital technologies and the extraordinary amount of data that devices and applications collect each day are increasingly driving companies to radically transform the business a

/pdf/implementing-a-digital-strategy-learning-from-the-experience-4ee1vo2uds.pdf

Implementing a Digital Strategy: Learning from the Experience of Three Digital Transformation Projects

Crafting a strategy

Impact of digital transformation on the automotive industry

The formulation and implementation of a digital transformation strategy (DTS) has become a key concern for many pre-digital organizations across traditional industries, but how such a strategy can be developed remains an open question. We used interpretive in-depth case study research to study how a European financial services provider has formulated and implemented a DTS. By focusing on the underlying processes and strategizing activities, we show that digital strategy making not only represents a break with the conventions of upfront strategic information systems (IS) planning, but reveals a new extreme of emergent strategy making. Specifically, we conclude that a DTS is continuously in the making, with no foreseeable end. By building on theory from IS strategizing and strategy-as-practice literature, we theorize an integrated process/activity model that characterizes DTS formulation and implementation in pre-digital organizations. Our model shows that the crafting of a DTS is a highly dynamic process involving iterating between learning and doing.

Digital transformation strategy making in pre-digital organizations: The case of a financial services provider

An increasing number of firms are responding to new opportunities and risks originating from digital technologies by introducing company-wide digital transformation strategies as a means to systematically address their digital transformation. Yet, what processes and strategizing activities affect the formation of digital transformation strategies in organizations are not well understood. We adopt a phenomenon-based approach and investigate the formation of digital transformation strategies in organizations from a process perspective. Drawing on an activity-based process model that links Mintzberg’s strategy typology with the concept of IS strategizing, we conduct a multiple-case study at three European car manufacturers. Our results indicate that digital transformation strategies are predominantly shaped by a diversity of emergent strategizing activities of separate organizational subcommunities through a bottom-up process and prior to the initiation of a holistic digital transformation strategy by top management. As a result, top management’s deliberate strategies seek to accomplish the subsequent alignment of preexisting emergent strategy contents with their intentions and to simultaneously increase the share of deliberate contents. Besides providing practical implications for the formulation and implementation of a digital transformation strategy, we contribute to the literature on digital transformation and IS strategizing.

Understanding digital transformation strategy formation: Insights from Europe's automotive industry

In the context of an ongoing digital transformation, companies across all industries are confronted with the challenge to exploit IT-induced business opportunities and to simultaneously avert IT-induced business risks. Due to this development, questions about a company’s overall status with regard to its digital transformation become more and more relevant. In recent years, an unclear number of maturity models was established in order to address these kind of questions by assessing a company’s digital maturity. Purpose of this Report is to show the large range of digital maturity models and to evaluate overall potential for approximating a company’s digital transformation status.

Simon Chanias

Papers

Digital transformation strategy making in pre-digital organizations: The case of a financial services provider

Understanding digital transformation strategy formation: Insights from Europe's automotive industry

How digital are we? Maturity models for the assessment of a company’s status in the digital transformation