Towards formulating a Digital Transformation Strategy: A Generic Reference Conceptual Model

Aghakhani, Ghazaleh [UCL] Wautelet, Yves [UCL] Kolp, Manuel [UCL] Heng, Samedi [UCL]

wind to a continuously changing business environment. This requires organizations to formulate strategies that embrace all of the potential of the digital transformation but also to understand what aspect of it is relevant for them and what aspect is not. Defining such a strategy from scratch and without proper guidance is nevertheless very hazardous so that strong guidelines on what the transformation entails are welcome. One of the techniques which can be used to enrich the process of strategy formulation is conceptual modelling. This research indeed aims to build – in the form of a conceptual model – a set of reference objectives considered in the literature on strategic management as being the key elements for pursuing a digital transformation. To be exhaustive when building such a representation and understand the hierarchy (i.e. decomposition) of such objectives, we have conducted a systematic literature review. Organizations pursuing their digital transformation can use the generic model as a reference that can be tailored to their own specific case. For further validation, the latter is indeed applied on the definition of the digital strategy of a Belgian hospital.