Digital transformation: A review and research agenda

Abstract

The ongoing and ubiquitous digital transformation challenges the raison d'être of firms and forces managers to rethink business strategies and operations and academics to reconsider related theories. To aid these efforts, we conduct a systematic review of research on firms' digital transformation, generating a database of 537 peer-reviewed academic articles and analyzing it using a novel multi-layered framework. The framework separates three layers: an organization's core activities, its peripheral activities, and its external environment. We find that firms that have come far in their transformations are more embedded in platform ecosystems with unclear business boundaries. Relatedly, we identify a tension between decentralizing versus centralizing power across organizational layers during a firm's digital transformation and how this dynamic affects corporate strategies and firms' internal and external boundaries.