Original title: Digital transformation: a review, synthesis and opportunities for future research
Digital transformation means organizational change connected to digital technology. The paper reviews earlier studies and sorts their findings into two broad areas: technology and people involved in the change. It breaks those areas into nine themes to help explain what shapes transformation and what follows from it. The review also finds that research has paid too little attention to the pace of change, workplace culture, and middle managers.
Imagine a school changing how it teaches by introducing new tools and routines. It is hard to understand the change by looking only at the tools, because people, workplace habits, and the speed of change also shape what happens. In this paper, the tools stand for technology, while the people and their roles stand for actors; the review sorts past research into themes and points out parts that have received too little attention.
Organizations changing through digital technology need to understand not just the technology, but also the people and conditions involved. This review points to gaps in research on the speed of change, workplace culture, and middle managers—areas that may matter to people carrying out transformation.
This review describes research published in the years and areas it covers; it does not establish how every organization experiences digital transformation or which practices cause better outcomes. Its findings identify underdeveloped research topics, but the abstract does not report tests of proposed solutions.
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Digital transformation: a review, synthesis and opportunities for future research — Swen Nadkarni, Reinhard Prügl — Management Review Quarterly — doi:10.1007/s11301-020-00185-7
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.