Toward a Taxonomy of Digital Transformation Initiatives

In almost every industry, firms launch digital transformation (DT) initiatives. However, not all of these initiatives have been successful. Despite its growing popularity in both research and industry, the term DT is used in a fragmented manner and ambiguity exists concerning the organizational characteristics of DT initiatives. While both academic and industry-oriented outlets have published a wide array of articles on DT initiatives, they are not comprehensive and have been published to satisfy different purposes. We argue that building a taxonomy of DT initiatives based on empirical cases will yield multiple benefits, such as providing a uniform categorization scheme for DT case studies that can be used to structure future field research. For this purpose, we follow an adapted version of the common taxonomy construction methodology. As a first step toward this goal, we have conducted case studies of DT initiatives of companies from different industries. We then applied the taxonomy building methodology to derive a working taxonomy of DT initiatives based on comprehensive, in-depth analysis. With our research, we aim to investigate a variety of DT initiatives. The resulting taxonomy can be used by practitioners to assess and compare their own DT initiatives and by researchers as a conceptual basis for future research projects on DT.     «

In almost every industry, firms launch digital transformation (DT) initiatives. However, not all of these initiatives have been successful. Despite its growing popularity in both research and industry, the term DT is used in a fragmented manner and ambiguity exists concerning the organizational characteristics of DT initiatives. While both academic and industry-oriented outlets have published a wide array of articles on DT initiatives, they are not comprehensive and have been published to satisf...     »