The role of digitalization in business and management: a systematic literature review

Digitalization and the innovation that it drives are changing organizations, institutions, and society in general (Kraus et al. 2021). Centering attention on organizations, digitalization is provoking disruptive changes within firms and their immediate business environment, accelerating the obsolescence of the current business model (Wirtz et al. 2022). Digital technologies play a central role in the creation and the reinforcement of disruptions that take place in society and the levels of industry (Aström et al. 2022). Faced with these disruptions, organizations design strategic responses and they use digital technologies to alter pathways to value creation in which they had previously trusted for continued competitiveness. To do so, they should implement structural changes and overcome the obstacles to Digital Transformation (DT) that hinder their efforts (Hess et al. 2016). These disruptions trigger strategic responses among the organizations that occupy a central place in the literature on DT.

Digital technologies also alter consumer expectations and behavior in disruptive ways (Vial 2019). When employing these technologies, the consumer assumes the role of an active participant in the dialogue between an organization and its stakeholders (Yeow et al. 2017). Consequently, the clients no longer see themselves as so externally dependent on a firm with which they can negotiate (Sia et al. 2016) and their expectations multiply with regard to the services that the firm could offer to them. The implementation of Information Technology (IT) and organizational transformation (Gray et al. 2013) shifts the attention of the firm and its supply chain and directs it towards customers with digital connections.

Digital technologies can also be disruptive when altering the competitive landscape. The use of platforms (i.e., P2P in finance) have redefined existing markets giving rise to the sharing economy (Richter et al. 2017) and facilitating the exchange of digital goods and services. Competition is no longer only physical and is converted into a virtual domain where information flows are quicker and less restrictive than in the physical world and the former barriers to entry become less meaningful. This behavior can be seen in the music industry where physical goods have been replaced by subscription services for music offered by firms that had never before formed part of the industry. Companies can therefore use digital technologies both to launch new processes and to improve internal processes with their supply chains and their environment, as much as to develop new business models (Bouncken et al. 2021).

Given the growing importance of digitalization and its effects on firms, the main objective of this study is to improve our understanding of digitalization in the most mature areas of the firm, in order to identify gaps and future lines of investigation. To do so, we performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) for two reasons: (1) to use an adapted protocol to guide the data curation and analysis process, and to ensure objectivity (Kraus et al. 2022); and (2) a high-quality review paper has to follow an established methodology for the systematic selection and analysis of papers, and should periodically cover different fields to identify the latest developments (Snyder 2019). As with the recent SLR of Chaudhary et al. (2021), and others listed in the bibliography of this paper, this study encompasses three distinct stages: specifying the objective of the research; outlining the research protocol; and, finally, reporting the findings. Having specified the main objective of this study, the following Research Questions (RQ) are set out below:

These research questions are addressed through the SLR approach of Tranfield, Denver, and Smart (2003) to identify and to consolidate existing knowledge for its critical analysis and to generate ideas (Ribeiro-Navarrete et al. 2021). It is an established approach for the generation of robust, reliable, and replicable findings (Chaudhary et al. 2021). In addition, it is well suited to our objective, because its purpose is to consolidate the development of knowledge by identifying gaps for future research in mature areas (Vrontis et al. 2020; Chaudhary et al. 2021). We therefore chose management, marketing, and finance and accounting as mature areas of the firm where digitalization should be reviewed.

After applying the aforementioned research protocol that will be explained in Sub-Sect. 3.1, we will respond to the RQs. In response to RQ1, we generated descriptive statistics from peer-reviewed research articles selected by outlining the research context. We approached RQ2 by employing content analysis to outline key themes that emerged from the articles that were reviewed. Themes that researchers conducting SLR have recently often identified through the use of content analysis (Skare et al. 2022), to understand the intellectual structure of the field (Chaudhary et al. 2021). Finally, we responded to RQ3 by discovering gaps and avenues for future research.

The contribution of this paper to the literature is through a systematic review of the findings of 119 review articles published in academic journals on digitalization within each of the aforementioned areas. In particular, the theoretical contributions of this work are as follows: (1) to provide the most complete and updated review of digitalization from a global perspective, summarizing the current state of knowledge within an integrated framework; (2) to reduce the complexity of digitalization by offering structure and clarity; and (3) to offer links between digitalization and established points of view in the literature on management, marketing, finance and accounting. In addition, this literature review will help scholars to develop novel empirical studies of interest in subsequent investigations (Post et al. 2020), and to propose new routes and opportunities within this field.

Digital tools such as Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud (SMAC) technologies are driving digitalization (Teubner and Stockhinger 2020), and offering opportunities to change the way in which firms work (Aström et al. 2022). In accordance with Chan et al. (2022), social networks give market visibility to a firm and establish links with their actors; mobile networks also connect different actors within the business eco-system, and offer learning and continuous access to information at any time and place. The cloud brings accessibility, storage, and relevant information exchange, work-flow monitoring, and remote collaboration. Finally, analytics facilitates understanding of business and client needs together with the identification of opportunities and market trends, and the recommendation and provision of services and personalized communications. Digital technologies are therefore easily available to the firm and can improve its effectiveness in profitable ways (Chan et al. 2022), provided their introduction is accompanied by innovative business models or transformations of the traditional model (Aström et al. 2021). Nevertheless, investigation must continue on the impact of new technologies for the decision-making process of the firm (Troise et al. 2022) and consumer privacy (Quach et al. 2022).

Although SMAC technologies drive digitalization, it is not merely a technical advance, but it is also an economic and a social one too (Legner et al. 2017). Digitalization refers to the interaction between digital technologies and both the social the institutional processes converting these technologies into infrastructural technologies and impacting on society and the economy (Teubner and Stockhinger 2020), thereby advancing communication, mobility, speed, virtualization, the disappearance of frontiers, interconnections, market transparency, and competition. However, the technical process of coding analogic information in a digital format, which means that the digitalized content is programmable, traceable, and communicable is known as digitization (Yoo et al. 2010a, b). It is a technical phenomenon and must not be confused with digitalization, because it includes fewer integral changes. Nevertheless, digitalization is found at some point between digitization and DT. DT implies immense organizational changes driven by digital technologies and, in consequence, profound alterations in business strategies and routines (Alzamora et al. 2021). However, digitalization is associated with important changes within sociotechnical structures (Yoo et al. 2010a, b), which are reconfigured through questioning the assumptions underlying the design and the use of digital technologies (Thorseng and Grisot 2017). Therefore, DT is naturally connected to the topic of organizational change, viewed as a ‘difference in form, quality, or state over time in an organizational entity’ (Van de Ven and Poole 1995, p. 512). For greater knowledge of DT in the field of management, see Hanelt et al. (2021).

When digital technologies are installed in an organization, they interact with organizational and managerial characteristics, specifically with the strategy and the legacy of an organization, as well as with the resources, the processes, the values, and the culture of an organization (Dewan et al. 2003), without forgetting positive attitudes towards change and technology (Dery et al. 2017). All these organizational antecedents are integrated and interact with environmental antecedents and the characteristics of the country, the industry, and the consumers. These characteristics include the legal conditions and the infrastructure of a country, as well as its regulatory frameworks and interventions (Cortet et al. 2016), and the dynamics of an industry driven by technology, which includes the changing technological panorama of a country (Alos-Simo et al. 2017). The above in no way ensures the success of many digital transformations within firms. In a recent study, Witschel et al. (2022) demonstrated that the innovation of the business model is an effective way of continuing to be competitive in the digital era. To do so, these authors defended the role that dynamic capabilities play in the innovation of the business model, as well as contextual factors, leadership and business mentalities. Moreover, Wen et al. (2022) affirmed that manufacturing firms with greater viability are more adaptable to DT and tend to implement differentiated competitive strategies, for which reason they concluded that the effect of incentivizing innovation is greater for firms of higher viability. The antecedents of DT (digital orientation, digital intensity, and digital maturity) were also analyzed to understand their influence on the financial success of firms (Nasisri et al. 2022). These authors maintained that digital orientation and digital intensity in themselves contributed nothing to the financial success of firms; and digital maturity acted as a mediator between digital orientation and the financial success of firms, and between digital intensity and the financial success of firms. DT, therefore, presented important opportunities for firms, but also for entrepreneurs. In the case of digital entrepreneurship, Chatterjee et al. (2022) provided evidence that perceived utility, perceived ease of use, and willingness to introduce strong and significant changes all affected digital entrepreneurship.

In addition, a DT is shaped by the characteristics of the consumer, in particular, the demand of the digital consumer. Consumers place increasing trust in digital technologies throughout their daily lives and personal interactions (Brynjolfsson et al. 2013) and expect ubiquitous access to virtual resources (Benlian et al. 2018). Both the appearance of digital technologies and their diffusion have led to greater data availability (on these aspects, see Vial 2019, p.123), which has in turn increased the importance of automated learning and the analysis of data for organizations (Weichert 2017). These data enable firms to offer services that better respond to the needs of their clients and to complete processes in more efficient ways for their own competitive advantage. Thus, some firms use social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to institute customer care operations and then use the data that are generated from these interactions to appeal to client sentiment in real time. Finally, the digital industrial transformation, known as the fourth industrial revolution or Industry 4.0 implies a change of paradigm from a hyperconnected and centralized manufacturing ecosystem to a decentralized one (Li et al. 2019). Under Industry 4.0, intelligent physical objects, decentralized subsystems, and even human components are perfectly integrated within an interoperable, hyperconnected, and decentralized production system (see Hodapp and Hanelt 2022) that is capable of adapting in real time and in an autonomous manner to environmental change (Ardito et al. 2019; Sanchez et al. 2020). Khan and Javaid (2022) considered that the IoT was a critical component of Industry 4.0, which improved product manufacturing efficiency, because it was done with fewer errors and costs. Somohano-Rodiríguez et al. (2022), analyzing the role that enabling digital Industry 4.0 (I4.0) technologies played in SME innovations, found that strategic planning advanced I4.0 and that enabling Information and Communication digital technologies promoted innovation more intensely than enabling digital technologies for integration and advanced robotics. Bhatia and Kumar (2022) analyzed the critical success factors of I4.0, highlighting “data governance” as the most critical factor.

The scope of the DT under Industry 4.0 expands beyond individual firms, involving the vertical integration of production systems and the horizontal integration of partners in a value chain (Tiwari 2020). Thanks to unprecedented commercial exploitation of social networks, Industry 4.0 also implies the integration of the client (Ghobakhloo 2020). Specifically, the findings of Kurniawan et al. (2022) made it clear that DT in the waste sector, not only promoted the recovery of non-biodegradable waste resources for a circular economy, but it also meant that the local community could perform online transactions of recycled goods through mobile apps. The industrial reports reveal that digitalization under Industry 4.0 offers numerous economic benefits for manufacturing, product quality, savings on operating costs, and performance in general (Dalenogare et al. 2018). Finally, if the adoption of I4.0 is a challenge for firms, the consideration of Industry 4.0 in the industry of sustainability is much more difficult (Verma et al. 2022).

Bearing in mind the earlier definition of digitalization, DT, Industry 4.0, and digital technologies, this SLR of digitalization and its effects on the firm is focused on three large mature areas: management, marketing, and finance, and accounting. The main reason for this study with its SLR methodology is because it has been verified that past reviews have employed various methodologies on different digital technologies, aspects of DT, digitalization, and Industry 4.0. However, no SLR by firm area has been found that presents a picture of existing research, research gaps, and future lines of research on digitization. Therefore, the novelty of this study is (1) in going beyond another review of some aspect of digital technologies, digitization or DT; and (2) in preparing an over-arching SLR of previously published review articles -rather than empirical articles- that integrates the above-mentioned mature areas of the firm.

Its methodological approach is explained and defined in what follows. Having proposed the main goal and the RQs in the introduction, first, the identification of the data set is defined. The Web of Science database (WoS) was chosen for the literature search, because it was considered to provide both adequate and comprehensive collections of relevant academic literature (Raff et al. 2020). Second, it was decided to use PRISMA as a systematic review protocol describing the rationale, hypothesis, and planning methods of the review (Shamseer et al. 2015). The application of the PRISMA protocol has helped to create a dataset of papers. Third, content-based research was conducted to analyze the content of the papers, and to identify the main bibliographic information in each paper and the relationship with different management, marketing, finance and accounting topics. Data processing helps to identify two kinds of findings. First, the descriptive statistics that link digitalization and different topics related to management, marketing, and finance and accounting (publications by years and citations, contribution by journals, country analysis, and so on). Second, the research trends and thematic area are defined through a co-concurrence analysis of the keywords using VOSviewer software.

Co-occurrence analysis of the keywords is a technique for analyzing the primary content of selected publications (Guo et al. 2019) with which essential words may be viewed in a search field along with co-occurrences (Secinaro et al. 2022). According to Skare et al. (2022), the co-occurrence analysis of the keywords also involved an analysis of the article abstracts to identify clusters of terms. A cluster is a non-overlapping set of interlinked terms. The co-occurrence of terms in the abstracts formed various clusters. The strength of the links between terms based on co-occurrence frequency was rated.

Vosviewer software can be used to construct relations and to visualize literature based on information in the academic literature. It can display the development and the emerging publication trends of a discipline over time. VOSviewer5 software identifies predominant terms and the co-occurrence across all articles during the analysis (Biggi and Giuliani 2020). The output of the process is the clustering of terms into dominant themes.

A detailed description of the research analysis and results is provided in the following sections.

In this section, the findings of this SLR conducted within the field of digitalization in business economics are reported.

Research into the digitalization of the firm has to be continuous, because technology is a dynamic organism (Prasad and Green 2015) and, consequently, its impact on the firm is also dynamic. In this section, the emergent tendencies of digitalization are analyzed in the different areas of the firm and identified in various firms, while responding to research question RQ3.

This systematic review of the literature on digitalization in three mature areas of the firm: marketing, management, and finance and accounting provides future lines of research.

In the field of marketing, the first topic that is shown is related with immersive technologies such as (AR), (VR), and interactive technologies such as AI. The capability of immersive technologies to improve upon the efficiency and the effectiveness of the client experience requires more detailed examination. To do so, the results of immersive technologies need to be investigated in the context of value creation for the client. The impact of technology to facilitate client relations is another frontier of investigation that can be explored. Specifically, IA is a technology quite new in comparison with others such as AR and VR, which means that analyzing the impact of IA on digital consumer behavior patterns is a very broad area of study. The fusion of AI and marketing will certainly grow (Pitt et al. 2018; Wirth 2018; Vishnoi and Bagga 2019) in such a way that investigating the consumer journey facilitated by AI technology can help academia to obtain information on the benefits of IA technology. Some other topics for research that researchers have identified in this field are as follows: to use smart algorithms for in-depth study of automated marketing concepts (Dumitriu and Popescu 2020) and to observe how multichannel AI systems can help to create a lean or a more intelligent technology (Cosmin Tănase 2018).

Future research must seek a more multicultural approach to define the specific differences of each country in terms of the use of online channels, the adoption of technology, and the commitment of digital channels to completely understand digital consumption.

Environmental problems, greater awareness of them among people and the recent COVID-19 health crisis has awakened interest in such topics as sustainability, wellbeing, and value creation. They especially highlighted the studies within the frame of sustainable consumption that concerned their work, principally with collaborative consumption in a digital context, and online rental activities (Lee and Chow 2020; Lee and Huang 2020; Luo et al. 2020).

The possible future of social media according to marketing-related questions and its impact on the individual, the firm and public policies is another area for future research that will be addressed in coming years. Finally, another subject that is closely associated with social media studies is source credibility. Specifically, the investigation will be centered on analyzing the impact of social media influencers and the impact of celebrities on firm branding activities (Sokolova and Kefi 2020).

In the field of management and managerial skills, continued research on DT is necessary through the perspective of systemic changes, holistic co-evaluation, and compartmentalized adaptation to advance towards the development of awareness, acceleration, and harmonization of DT, respectively. Also, more research on all those aspects of intra-organizational integration and innovation as drivers of malleable organizational designs is still needed. For example, when describing strategies and steps on how organizations can guide their efforts to achieve DT, it is also proposed that future investigations on DT be approached through a complementary ethical perspective focused on three aspects: the balance between organizational effort, ethics, and value co-creation. Finally, a whole research gap is opened on the implications of Industry 4.0 technologies in business innovation (Oztemet and Gursev 2020).

In finance, the topics that have been identified for research in this study contribute to various currents of thought in the literature, including the emergent literature on Fintech, and the literature on entrepreneurship, innovation, and international business. In the first place, the field of Fintech entrepreneurship is an emergent area that is fundamental to promote entrepreneurship and the production of innovative technologies (Álvarez et al. 2016). Specifically, external factors can influence the distribution of the quality of entrepreneurship when the entry of low-quality firms is reduced (Khanin et al. 2022; Ritala et al. 2021). Studies have compared the differences between reward crowdfunding and capital crowdfunding in the development of Fintech, which can help to comprehend the workings of the entrepreneurial spirit better (Troise et al. 2021). In addition, Fintech as a strategy in the digital age, is presented as an interesting research topic, since it is having an impact on cross-border commerce, causing changes in the nature of organizations and in-service businesses (for example, commercial contracts and currency trading). Finally, the business model of digital money is another of the focuses of future research (Joao 2018; Rodriguez Bolivar and Scholl 2019), since mobile payments have almost pervaded the daily life of many people, with wide coverage, and innovative payment methods that show constant vitality (Sun et al. 2022).

In summary, the challenges that the digitalization of firms, institutions and society in general presents in this day and age are cybersecurity and user privacy (Wylde et al. 2022). Specifically, maintaining a balance between the anonymity of users and the traceability of the transaction (Fujitani et al. 2021); guaranteeing security and privacy of financial data in the face of a tendency towards open banking (Liao et al. 2022), financial scamming, and hacking (Zhao 2021). In the case of SMEs, what remains for them to do is to employ the technology as a means of transformation to confront a competitive, complex, and uncertain business environment (Rozmi et al. 2021) All these challenges are presented as incipient lines of investigation, together with others such as the processing of information obtained with different technologies from firms and their rapid response to market fluctuations (Li et al. 2021). The way in which automatic learning algorithms function and the extent to which they can affect organizational decisions and actions, being at the root of tactical and strategic errors, also remain to be studied in depth.

Over the past decade and above all, as from 2020, an increase in the number of publications on digitalization, digital technologies, and DT have been seen. Although this paper is centered on the more mature areas of the firm, the literature is limited. In this paper, a detailed analysis of current achievements in investigation of digitalization has been performed, taking into account the most relevant publications. A systematic review has been conducted of the literature based on the sample of 119 high-quality peer-reviewed review articles in the fields of management, marketing, and finance and accounting.

In the discipline of marketing, five principal research tendencies have been identified in current investigations: (1) the performance of digital marketing from the perspective of the consumer centered on its adoption and engagement; (2) the management of social networks as a marketing strategy; (3) knowledge of consumer behavior through big-date technology; (4) the impact of mass-media campaigns through digital technologies; and (5) the customer journey via online outlets.

In the case of management, three principal tendencies have been highlighted in this study: (1) information management and performance, so that it is converted into knowledge for organizations; (2) the design of flexible organizations to adapt themselves to their business environment; (3) the impact of Internet technologies and digitalization on logistics and supply channel management.

Finally, in the discipline of finances and accounting, a tendency may be highlighted for each discipline. In finances, the principal research tendency is to continue inquiring into technologies such as blockchain applied to financial services, whereas in accounting the impact of cryptocurrency may be highlighted in accounting systems and risk management.

As a final conclusion, this paper may be considered to have: (1) provided the most complete and updated review of digitalization from a global perspective, summarizing the current state of knowledge within an integrated framework; (2) reduced the complexity of digitalization by offering structure and clarity; and (3) advanced links between digitalization and established points of view in the literature on management, marketing, and finance and accounting.

Our study has some limitations that can be identified in the steps of our research process. First, given that our study used a particular database, some articles may have been overlooked in the data-compilation process. Second, the filters applied in the data-analysis process might have omitted some relevant studies, due to our choices of cut-off decisions (for example, with respect to the time frames). In addition, the process of encoding the articles was manual and might therefore have been affected by subjectivity, although we sought to avoid that bias by performing multiple encoding routines and various rounds of checking the encoding. Third, with respect to the summarization, it is accepted that there might be valuable alternatives to an ‘entry-process-exit’ model (Edmondson and Mcmanus 2007) as a meta-structure. In the light of these limitations, we encourage other researchers to enlarge and to improve upon our findings, employing different sources and analytical approaches.