The Machine at the center? Consulting and digital transformation in four Chinese organizations

What can consultants do to assist client leveraging digital transformation to serve better the well-being of employees? Whereas most of the DT projects fail, the causes of these failures are not solely related to information technology but also to organizational and human factors. Current DT processes however, remain heavily influenced by the concept of enterprise architecture and, as a result, appear to put the machine front and center as opposed to those involved in the digital transformation process. Hence the research question becomes: RQ1: Do current digital transformation processes put “the machine” front and center through enterprise architecture? In order to investigate this question, four organizational cases were examined. In addition to analyzing the technology and digital transformation process utilized, 106 semi-structured interviews and observations were also conducted. Our findings indicate that the most successful digital transformation case may be indeed related to enterprise architecture and to strategic alignment. However, a consideration of the organization, the IT management mode and the business model, reveals the importance of decentralization and innovation for DT success in addition to enterprise architecture or strategic alignment. Therefore, this case suggests that the response to the question: “what can consultants do to assist client leveraging digital transformation to serve better the well-being of employees?” may be: “How consultants and managers can assist with organizational and systems design for work procedures, and processes that improve performance?”. Also, this case suggests that, rather than the machine, workers shall be front and center of DT.