Toward a Typology of "Going Digital"

With the development of digital technologies, the lines defining traditional industries are blurring. However, there is still a lack of a standard or shared common understanding of digital transformation in terms of its nature and content, change process, underlying mechanisms, and desired outcomes as they are still under-specified. To build a common ground for choosing and using appropriate approaches to manage the "going digital" journey, this paper attempts to illustrate how digital transformation occurs with a proposed typology from a change management perspective based on the cross-case analysis of 103 organizational case studies, and to clarify the essential attributes of an (organizational) digital transformation and how they can be classified into four different types: digitalization, digital mutation, digital metamorphosis, and digital transformation.