Digital Transformation for Sustainability: A Qualitative Analysis

Abstract

In the digital era, finding a new way to conduct business becomes mandatory. The risk of disruption, the bloody competition, the change in customer behaviours and the scarcity of resources, these are few of many drivers that force companies to change their business models and adapt to the new market reality. Digital transformation emerged as a recent concept that help companies to best leverage digital capabilities such as Big data, Internet of things, Cloud Computing and Artificial Intelligence. The purpose of this paper was to conduct a qualitative analysis on three big size companies in order to enrich the literature on this concept and to discuss whether or not companies could reach sustainability during their transformation journeys. The three in-depth case studies showed that customers, data, competition and innovation are four dimensions of digital transformation that have an impact on the companies’ sustainability actions. We proposed at the end of the article a future research model, composed of 5 hypotheses, to be validated by a future empirical study.