Track description
n°9

Digital transformation continues to gain momentum across industries (e.g. Vial, 2019, Carroll et al., 2023) and among scholarship (cf. Markus & Rowe, 2023; Wessel et al., 2025). To remain competitive, companies use digital technologies to transform their existing business models or to facilitate new ones. This has far-reaching effects on society and organizations as not only large market players but also small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) with limited resources and/or skills (Sagala & Öri, 2024) face costly integration of new digital technologies or dependence on large data sets. In the Information Systems (IS) field, numerous contributions have advanced our understanding of digital transformation and its effects at societal and organizational level by taking a process or outcome perspective (Markus & Rowe, 2023; Vial, 2019; Wessel et al., 2021).

Understanding digital transformation from a process perspective, scholars investigated questions on how digital transformation changes an entity’s properties (Vial, 2019). At organizational level, these properties can be value proposition or identity (Wessel et al., 2021). Moreover, digital transformation changes organizational structures and processes (Baiyere et al., 2020), value creation (Svahn et al., 2017), the performance of work (Baptista et al., 2020). One key aspect that sholars investigated to unpack these change processes is digital transformation strategy (e.g. Chanias et al., 2019; Matt et al., 2015). Moreover, recent contributions paid attention to how digital transformation can normalize (Carrol et al., 2021), be sustained (Carroll et al., 2023), how digital transformation emerges from relationships among different actors (Baiyere et al., 2025) and whether we can re-image digital transformation as responsible digital transformation (Pappas et al., 2023, Zimmer et al., 2023).

Beyond the processes perspective (Wiener et al., 2025), outcomes of digital transformation initiatives remain of paramount interest, particularly their effects on firm performance, organizational resilience, and responsible transformation. Promising research directions include evaluating digital transformation success at the organizational level (e.g. Weritz et al., 2023) as well as assessing broader impacts at the industry or societal level (e.g., Pappas et al., 2023, Zimmer et al., 2023). These efforts provide critical insights into the governance of digital transformations and the effective integration of diverse stakeholder perspectives.

Having been part of ECIS since 2014, this track will examine how the design, development, implementation and use of digital technologies transforms organizations and their associated stakeholders. In line with the conference theme “Re-imagining Digital Technology for Business, Management, and Society”, we invite contributions that investigate how societal and/or organizational digital transformations lead to responsible digital futures that take an ecosystem or multi-stakeholder perspective within and across organisations on the process and outcome of digital transformation. The track welcomes submissions from all theoretical and methodological perspectives (i.e. qualitative, quantitative, design-oriented, conceptual).

• Management of digital transformation processes from a holistic perspective
• Management of organizational ambidexterity in digital transformation (e.g. digital innovation units)
• Development and implementation of digital transformation strategies
• Digital technologies as enablers of new business models
• Measuring digital transformation success and outcomes
• People-centered, and worker-centered digital transformation initiatives
• Phases of and transition between digital transformation initiatives
• Development of digital competencies and capabilitites within companies
• Business architecture planning for digital transformation
• Effects of digital transformation on organizational structure
• The impact of digital technologies on the relationship between firms and their stakeholders
• The digital transformation of work and workplaces
• Digital transformation of digital infrastructures for work
• Digital transformation and responsibility

• Baiyere, A., Salmela, H., & Tapanainen, T. (2020). Digital Transformation and the New Logics of Business Process Management. European Journal of Information Systems, 29(3), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/0960085X.2020.1718007
• Baiyere, A., Zimmer, M. P., Staykova, K. S., & Jöhnk, J. (2025). Beyond Digital vs. IT: The Untold Story of Their Relationship from an Organizing Logic Perspective. Information Systems Research, Articles in Advance.
• Baptista, J., Stein, M. K., Klein, S., Watson-Manheim, M. B., & Lee, J. (2020). Digital work and organisational transformation: Emergent Digital/Human work configurations in modern organisations. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 29(2), 101618. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsis.2020.101618
• Carroll, N., Hassan, N. R., Junglas, I., Hess, T., & Morgan, L. (2023). Transform or be transformed: The importance of research on managing and sustaining digital transformations. European Journal of Information Systems, 32(3), 347-353.
• Carroll, N., McLaffery, B., Conboy, K., & Donnellan, B. (2021). Normalising a digital transformation. In: International Conference on Information Systems, Austin, TX.
• Chanias, S.; Myers, M. and Hess, T. (2019): Digital transformation strategy making in pre-digital organizations: The case of a financial services provider. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 28 (1), 17-33.
• Matt, C., Hess, T. and Benlian, A. (2015). Digital Transformation Strategies. Business & Information Systems Engineering 57 (5), 339–343.
• Pappas, I.O., Mikalef, P., Dwivedi, Y.K. et al. (2023). Responsible Digital Transformation for a Sustainable Society. Information Systems Frontiers 25, 945–953.
• Svahn, F., Mathiassen, L., & Lindgren, R. (2017). Embracing Digital Innovation in Incumbent Firms: How Volvo Cars Managed Competing Concerns. MIS Quarterly, 41(1), 239–253. https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2017/41.1.12
• Vial, G. (2019). Understanding digital transformation: A review and a research agenda. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 28(2), 118-144.
• Weritz, P., Braojos, J., Matute, J., & Benitez, J. (2024). Impact of strategic capabilities on digital transformation success and firm performance: theory and empirical evidence. European Journal of Information Systems, 1-21.
• Wiener, M., Strahringer, S., Kotlarsky, J. (2025). Where are the processes in IS research on digital transformation? A critical literature review and future research directions, The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 34(2).
• Wessel, L., Baiyere, A., Ologeanu-Taddei, R., Cha, J., Jensen, T.B. (2021). Unpacking the Difference Between Digital Transformation and IT-Enabled Organizational Transformation. Journal of the Association for Information Systems,22 (1), 102-129.
• Wessel, L., Mosconi, E., Indulska, M., & Baiyere, A. (2025). Digital Transformation: Quo Vadit? Information Systems Journal, Online first. https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12578
• Zimmer, M. P., Järveläinen, J., Stahl, B. C., & Mueller, B. (2023). Responsibility of/in digital transformation. Journal of Responsible Technology, 16, 100068. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrt.2023.100068

All leading IS conferences have a track on digital transformation and related topics. At ECIS, this track can build upon a more than 10-years tradition. The track is timely in that it addresses digital transformation topics that continue to spark interest in our community as well as that it keeps evolving to include and focus on emerging digital transformation topics. This timeliness, and the positive reception in our community, shows in the high and increasing number of submissions and the great quality of the research papers accepted for publication.