General Approach for Formulating a Digital Transformation Strategy

To take advantage of information technologies, organizations need to define a clear strategy. Numerous works have provided definitions and phases of digital strategies. Some of these strategies are context-specific, while others deal with the common elements of digital strategies regardless of the digital transformation context. However, these works do not address a holistic approach. This raises ambiguity regarding digital strategy definitions and approaches. To eliminate this ambiguity, the current research tries to take advantage of existing digital strategies to propose a general digital strategy definition and build a general digital transformation approach. This work analyses various digital transformation strategies, to extract and classify their common elements in order to build a general approach that frame and drive the formulation of digital transformation strategies. To define such a general approach, the current paper analyses the effects of IT Governance and Management Strategy on the Digital Transformation Maturity. This analysis identified how IT Governance and Management Strategy can contribute to formulating a digital transformation strategy. Partial Least Square (PLS) was adopted in this research to develop an empirical evaluation for the case of 30 digital strategies and frameworks. Based on this empirical study several results have been presented in this work, namely: determination of a digital strategy definition and identification of a digital strategy approach. The proposed approach is composed of the following building blocks: Strategic Awareness, Business Strategic Planning, IT Organizational Structure, Steering committee, IT Prioritization Process, IT Investment Decisions, IT Strategic Planning, IT Budgeting, IT Reporting, IT Reaction Capacity and Management Strategy.