The Evolution of Digital Transformation

The evolution of digital transformation (DT) poses a significant challenge for organizations worldwide, representing both disruptive difficulties and tremendous opportunities for renewing value offerings, business models, and organizational practices. To use DT as an impetus for positive change, however, it is critical that scholars and practitioners have a clear, unified understanding of the concept. We structure our discussion as follows: Sect. 1 of this chapter discusses the confusion around the concept “digital transformation” and its related concepts (i.e., digitization, digitalization). Section 2 presents the etymology of these three concepts’, leading to a discussion of the main etymological reasons behind the confusion. In the Sect. 3, we explore the historical use of these concepts in the pertinent literature; we reveal how scholars have interpreted the concepts inconsistently and associated them with a myriad of different realities/phenomena. Section 4 introduces a concept formation and assessment methodology to lay the theoretical foundation of how concepts can be analyzed and assessed. Section 5 offers a collection of existing definitions of digitization, digitalization, and digital transformation that we selected to analyze their defining attributes. We present a detailed example of how we systematically analyzed and assessed digitization’s historical defining attributes. We then report the results of the same analysis for digitalization and digital transformation to assuage the “fuzziness” issue associated with these concepts. Section 6 sums up and discusses our findings that we hope will inspire academics and practitioners to use these terms carefully and consistently.