Beyond the Digital Transformation? Towards a Meta-Concept for Managing the Digital Change of Companies

In order to tap the potential of digital technologies, two main concepts have been developed in IS Research: the currently much-discussed concept of “digital transformation” and the concept of “IS/IT-organizational transformation”, which was developed many years ago. Both concepts refer to organizations that emerged in the pre-digital age. In addition, there are initial considerations as to what structures “digital companies” have and whether companies from the pre-digital era can or should become digital companies. Until now, all three concepts are unconnected, yet they all address the same question, each within different contexts. This paper proposes a process-oriented meta-concept that relates the three established concepts. We reconstruct the process of digital-driven change in a very successful European media group over a period of 70 years and use the model of punctuated equilibrium as a theoretical lens. Rather than synthesizing the concepts into a unified new theory, our concept describes the alternation between relatively stable and open phases of a company in the context of the availability of new digital technologies, thereby providing an explanation of when and why each concept becomes salient. It also describes when an open phase starts and comes to closure. All three concepts, which were previously unconnected, can be positioned in this concept. In this way, we achieve significant progress in conceptual clarity and show in which context each of the three concepts is relevant. For practitioners, our integrative approach provides guidance for selecting and sequencing concepts in the specific situation of a company.