The Role of Digital Technologies in Enabling Digital Transformation to Address Societal and Business Challenges - A Sociotechnical Perspective

The ubiquity of digital technologies in everyday professional and non-professional life is increasingly blurring the line between physical and digital worlds and inducing changes in society and industry, which are summarized under the term digital transformation (DT). At the societal level, formerly non-digital decision contexts (e.g., health, resource consumption) are now becoming digital technology-enabled and connected (e.g., smart health trackers, smart home solutions) and have the potential to influence individuals’ decision-making and behavior. By allowing for data collection, processing, and retrieval, digital technologies can facilitate more conscious decisions and sustainable behaviors, both being important levers for addressing societal challenges such as achieving sustainable health or sustainable resource consumption. However, for digital technologies to realize their full potential, their impact on individuals using the digital technology-enabled devices also needs to be considered, including impacts on decision-making processes, trusting beliefs, and user perceptions like perceived usefulness. Therefore, we require a good understanding of both, the technical component (i.e., digital technologies) and the social component (i.e., individuals, society, organizations) which together form a sociotechnical system, also referred to as an information system (IS) artifact. Such a sociotechnical perspective is also relevant for DT on an organizational level, where digital technologies are increasingly used to innovate an organization’s business model (i.e., its products, processes, and value proposition) to stay competitive in a rapidly changing environment. For example, organizations adopt information and communication technologies (ICTs) to enable virtualized work practices and collaboration (e.g., remote maintenance, virtual site visits) to address business challenges caused by disruptions in their environment. However, technology adoption requires significant financial and human resources, and not every available technology is tailored to the needs of every organization. Combined with low success rates for organizational DT, we require a better understanding of the opportunities and challenges digital technologies present, as well as of how their adoption enables successful DT. Taken together, this thesis is motivated by two overarching research questions focusing on how digital technologies can be used to enable societal DT to address societal challenges, and how digital technologies can be used by organizations to enable organizational DT to cope with business challenges. Against this backdrop, five studies were conducted and published as part of this dissertation. The first three articles relate to the societal context and investigate how decision support systems (DSS) and Green IS artifacts influence individuals’ decision-making and behavior to address two pressing sustainability challenges of society: achieving sustainable health through managing societal crises like the COVID-19 pandemic and achieving sustainable resource consumption to contribute to the globally agreed sustainable development goals. The fourth and fifth article relate to the organizational context and examine the adoption of ICTs and immersive technologies in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that aim to overcome business challenges (e.g., comply with government regulations, adapt to changing market requirements) through organizational DT. More specifically, the first article investigates how individuals searching for a medical practice to go to can be assisted by a DSS providing crowding information (i.e., how busy a location is) complemented by a temporal cue (i.e., how timely the information was retrieved). Users of such DSS can consider crowding information in their decision-making, which is relevant because crowds represent an increased risk of infection – particularly in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The results reveal that the presence of crowding information leads to a selection of less crowded locations and that this effect is strengthened by temporal cues indicating a timely (i.e., close to real-time) retrieval of such information. Moreover, the effect of timely crowding information on users’ decision-making is strongest for users with low (vs. high) health anxiety, a particularly relevant moderator in this research context. The second and third article relate to the societal challenge of achieving more sustainable resource consumption in private households. They investigate how individuals can be motivated to reduce their resource consumption through a Green IS artifact that allows them to set a consumption goal. To that end, the second article examines the effect of one’s relative performance (i.e., performing better or worse than others) and a goal’s evaluative standard (i.e., a goal referring to one’s own or others’ consumption intensity). The results demonstrate that individuals who perform worse than others reduce their resource consumption to a higher degree with a goal referring to others than with a goal referring to themselves. In contrast, better-performing individuals reduce their resource consumption more fiercely with a goal referring to themselves than with a goal referring to others. These findings are confirmed by the third article. However, the third article goes beyond the results of the previous study by examining two additional goal-related design features: goal incentives (i.e., collaboration vs. competition) and a goal’s reference group (i.e., anonymous vs. familiar others). The results show that individuals have a personal preference for a particular goal incentive, with individuals who prefer collaboration showing a preference for familiar collaborators, whereas those who prefer competition generally prefer anonymous competitors. The fourth article shifts the focus to the organizational context and on how ICTs enable SMEs from the event industry to innovate their business model to respond to business challenges caused by environmental disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The results demonstrate the importance of evaluating digital technologies on the basis of affordances (i.e., opportunities) and constraints (i.e., hinderances) and from the perspective of different relevant stakeholders (i.e., SMEs and their customers). In terms of enabling new business models to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic in the short and medium term, readily available ICTs exhibit greater affordances and, more decisively, weaker constraints than more sophisticated ICTs and thus are preferred by SMEs in the event industry and their customers. The fifth article examines the adoption of immersive technologies (e.g., augmented and virtual reality technologies) in manufacturing SMEs. The results demonstrate that the consideration of different stakeholder perspectives (e.g., SMEs, suppliers) and particularly the consideration of existing constraints play a critical role in the overall assessment of digital technologies for their use in organizational DT. In addition, the findings reveal which measures are essential to overcome existing constraints in order to reach organizational, actor, environmental, and technological readiness to enable SMEs to realize the affordances of digital technologies. Overall, this dissertation provides an advanced understanding of how digital technologies enable DT in society and industry, thereby allowing for ways to address societal and business challenges. The studies comprised in this thesis contribute to research on user behavior and decision-making in digital environments by highlighting the influential role of crowding information, temporal cues, and personalized goal-related design features on users’ real-world behavior. Moreover, the results contribute to research on DT and organizational technology adoption by allowing for a more holistic understanding of the role of technology affordances and constraints as success factors for digital technology adoption in SMEs. Apart from these contributions to research, this thesis also offers valuable insights and actionable recommendations for practitioners looking for ways to manage societal or business challenges. Specifically, design recommendations for designers of DSS and Green IS artifacts are provided to address societal challenges, along with guidance for managers and executives of SMEs who are facing business challenges and are looking for ways to succeed in their organizational DT.