Digital Transformation can Threaten your Organizational Survival without Digital Self-Awareness

Organizations undertaking digital transformation efforts often seriously underestimate the difficulties of initiatives to design a digitally responsive and mature organization. Beyond merely digitally archiving documents and developing a file structure, a digitally transformed organization has transcended the analog-to-digital conversion when digital technologies are at the core of the business model. Organization digital awareness (ODA) is a necessary organizational skill to keep up with the increasing rate of technological change and navigate digital transformation–actions commensurate with long-term organizational investment, rather than adopting digital technology for technology's sake. This study provides a definition of ODA and develops a digital transformation self-awareness model (DXSAM) based on a systems engineering process model combined with an organizational learning model. The findings indicate prior research has identified ODA as a necessary organizational trait for digital transformation, but the concepts suffer from a lack of a unifying framework. Digital transformation models must make explicit accommodation for ODA and incorporate a feedback mechanism to enable adaptation in the digital transformation strategy process.