Unlocking digitalization's possibilities: reaching sustainability by adopting the right digital strategy

A VUCA world! This popular acronym describes today's business environment with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. These constraints have made from “reaching sustainability” a tougher task to be achieved. This paper reinforces the literature on this subject and proposes a new way to follow using the possibilities that digitalization and digital strategies offer. The paper starts by defining the concept of sustainability and listing the most important factors that drive companies to look for this “Holy Grail”. Then it describes the most well-known tracks identified in order to sustain a given business. After, the paper introduces the emerging concept of digital strategies and discusses them as an alternative to the alignment of business and information technology (IT) strategies. We propose after a framework that unlocks the digitalization possibilities by explaining how to reach sustainability through digitalization. We apply the proposed framework on the telecom industry as a case study before concluding.