Organizational Digital Transformation Readiness: An Exploratory Investigation

The widespread adoption of digital technologies across various aspects of society has led to the emergence of two highly context-dependent constructs that explain how businesses are getting ready for transformative digital processes: digital readiness and digital transformation (DT). However, assessing the extent to which an organization is ready to succeed in a DT initiative still requires further investigation. This research addresses this gap by working towards a practical definition and model of organizational digital transformation readiness (ODTR). The authors investigate how an organization’s readiness for digital transformation should be conceptualized, assessed, and improved through a systematic literature review. This literature review covered the years 2004 to 2021, as well as articles published until May 2022. The search was conducted in the Web of Science database, as well as in the most important publishers’ databases, resulting in 264 papers on “e-readiness”, 72 articles on “digital transformation”, and 8 articles on “digital transformation readiness”. Based on this, some dimensions emerged as the most prominent for understanding how companies prepare for transformative digital processes, namely technological resources, business processes, management capability, human capability, and corporate culture, which highlights the multidisciplinary nature of ODTR. Furthermore, the literature review showed the similarity between e-readiness and digital readiness, allowing the assessment of an organization’s maturity for digital transformation. The review synthesized the scientific literature on the readiness of organizations for digital transformation, allowing the proposition of an integrative framework to evaluate ODTR. Moreover, it allows the development of insights and recommendations for practices related to successful digital transformation initiatives. As this literature review has limitations related to its scope and search criteria, future studies can provide a broader investigation into how organizations respond to the challenge of DT and their respective readiness to do so in practice.