Digital Transformation and Digital Culture: A Literature Review of the Digital Cultural Attributes to Enable Digital Transformation

Abstract

Abstract Digital transformation is unavoidable for organizations nowadays. The promise of financial success pushes organizations to speed up their digital transformation, by increasing the budgets allocated to it. Organizations understand more and more that digital transformation is not only an IT endeavor and that it implies, among others, the important aspect of digital culture. Digital culture goes hand in hand with the process of digital transformation, being both a premise to, and an outcome of it. As a premise, digital culture can be either an enabler for, or a barrier to digital transformation, which is why digital culture is receiving increased attention in scientific literature. This study analyzes the scientific literature to create a well-rounded definition of digital culture, categorizing and describing in detail the attributes of digital culture, both the ones mentioned by previous studies with a similar purpose and adding new categories to provide a more comprehensive understanding of what digital culture entails. Digital culture is characterized by collaboration, both internal and external, customer-centricity, seamless flow of information, decision making at lower organizational levels, responsiveness and rapid action, innovation and entrepreneurial mindset, risk-affinity, flexibility, agility and adaptability, learning and growth orientation, as well as datadriven decisions, digital-first mindset, openness to unusual career developments and change openness and readiness.