Managing Change in the Digital Age: A Comparative Study of Change Management and Digital Transformation Models

Today’s business market demand firms to innovate to remain competitive, and the biggest challenge of innovation is managing the change process. This paper highlights the importance of digital transformation for organizations to remain competitive and generate a competitive advantage in the hyper-competitive business market. Adopting new technology is complex, requiring dealing with the technical and human side of change. Change management is critical to ensure successful transformations and tackle the resistance to change, which is one of the main challenges any change initiative faces. This paper compares six change management models against eight digital transformation models to identify similarities and differences, which can be seen as strengths and weaknesses. The analysis of the models enabled the identification of critical activities that organizations embarking on change initiatives must follow to ensure the success of the implementation and sustainability of the change. The activities were categorized into four main stages to facilitate the comparison of the digital transformation and change management frameworks. The paper concludes that there is a need for a more robust model for both change management and digital transformation, capable of reflecting the current situation that organizations face where the only constant is change.