Digital Transformation: An Enterprise Transformation Theory Perspective

Digital Transformation (DT) has emerged as one of the most talked-about phenomena of the decade. The rush of things around DT also exposes its challenges towards effectively integrating digital technologies into the scheme of things. The proliferating literature on DT offers a fragmented understanding and is unclear about the constituents and configuration of the phenomena. The above concerns primarily arise from insufficient theoretical grounding and deficiencies in the extant conceptualizations. To address these concerns, the article posits an over-arching research question to examine the phenomena while theoretically uncovering its foundational elements. Accordingly, the study resorts to the enterprise transformation framework to explicate the transformative aspects based on a two-phase analysis. The first phase adopts a text-mining approach for uncovering the latent themes underlying the DT scholarship, followed by a qualitative approach involving content analysis. We finally propose a theoretically motivated conceptualization of the tenets of DT. We specifically investigate the phenomenon's scope, ways, means, and ends. The proposed framework is further validated following a multi-case analysis. Our conceptualization grounds and establishes the significance of foundational elements having a theoretical basis for identifying DT. Our examination offers an implementation guide for the practice, which we delineate subsequently.