Creating a Digital Culture for Digital Transformation: A Literature Review of Practical Steps

Abstract

In the context of a world characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, the digital transformation of organizations has become unavoidable. Digital culture has received increased attention as an essential factor in the success or failure of digital transformation. However, there is no generally accepted digital cultural model for organizations to build upon, nor a clear roadmap to follow on how to change the existing culture into a digital one to facilitate the process of digital transformation. This paper represents a review of the so-far proposed digital cultural models, respectively of the action steps suggested by literature for creating a digital culture. First, the paper combines the dimensions of three existing digital culture models into a more comprehensive model and secondly, it structures the action steps by the new digital culture dimensions. The action steps are further divided into high-level and practical ones. This is the first study comprising a sum of action steps towards a digital culture from published literature up to this point. The findings show firstly that digital cultural models overlap to a high degree. Secondly, the suggested action steps are similar, clear patterns becoming recognizable, however that a lot of them remain high-level, abstract or theoretical. This study represents a good start into creating a roadmap for organizations for creating a digital culture, however more research is required to be able to provide a detailed, practical and actionable set of steps for organizations on their digital transformation and digital culture change journey.